Conditions of Service

Posted on January 1rst, 2016 by Mike Copsey

Abuse of Our House Cleaning Services

This is a wide category including things like micro-managing, underbidding our estimates, refusing to pay - yes this has happened, or asking us to operate outside of the services list found on our house cleaning services page.

Once we enter your home to clean, we will have a set routine for the most part, that we will perform each time we come to clean your home. Our estimates are based on this repetitiveness that leads to efficient work and time management. Telling us to do one thing then telling us to do something different or following us around and telling us what to do the entire time we are there, costs us time and money. We need a clear cut plan of what you wish us to do before we start cleaning your home. If there are changes to this plan we can do another estimate and charge accordingly. We make a serious effort to clean your home; in the end, we are not perfect and the cleaning work is what it is. If you are not satisfied, please try to find someone else to critique perfection.

We Need Room to Work

If your house is full of people, or even one busy person that is continually making us work around them or wait, it makes our job more difficult and time consuming so we may choose to add extra charges for this.

Your Home Should be Picked Up Before We Clean

We base our estimates on the time it takes to clean a house. If we have to stop and pick up every room, it takes considerably longer to then clean the house afterwards. If your home becomes more cluttered or more things are left where we need to clean, we may try to negotiate a new price to cover this extra time need to pick up things or we may outright refuse to clean certain areas and in some cases terminate house cleaning all together.

House Cleaners are Imperfect

We are not robots. We make mistakes or occasionally forget something just like the rest of the people in the world. We don't mind constructive criticism but there is a point at which too much is well, too much, and if it is about details that are not covered on our house cleaning services page, we may refuse your request and even choose to terminate our services if it continues. Doing things not listed on our house cleaning services page are completely optional for us!

Humidity and Temperature Should be Controlled

Working environment should be maintained at or under 76 degrees Fahrenheit or a another method to maintain a lower humidity. There is more to this than just keeping a house cleaner comfortable while they clean your home. All homes contain wood and most have basements.. When we clean and air-conditioning / dehumidifiers are not running to remove the extra water vapor created by all the cleaning that we do, that moisture takes a lot longer to evaporate off of floors and fixtures and once it does, it becomes trapped inside your house.. Even more so on every day, the humditiy levels change without us even being there! See also Cleaning Hardwood Floors

Wood expands when it absorbs moisture and this can put stress on your floor boards, wood furniture and even the internal wood structure of the house itself. Things like paint, hardwood clear coat finishes (on your floor boards and furniture) and even the sheet-rock on your walls, are all susceptible to these expansions and contractions (when the humidity finally leaves – or in the winter months when it is very dry, the wood shrinks again). The wood gets longer and shorter but some paints, clear-coat finishes and other material that are attached to the wood will not change in size and that creates stress on both the finish and the wood it's attached to.

Along with the possible added stress on wood items, extra moisture that makes it into a basement will tend too stay there longer than it should. This could contribute to mold build up on colder surfaces such as concrete floors and walls giving mold the moisture it needs to grow!

If it happens to be cool and dry outside, the windows could be opened to help remove that extra moisture. This is not necessary in the colder months as the average humidity is typically much lower at those lower temperatures.

An all around solution is to leave your airconditionaing running the day we clean to remove that extra moisture. Next best would be running dehumidifiers at their rated capacity – this could mean having several running to cover an entire house including the basement. In the winter time, the opposite is also true. Use humidifiers to control low humidity conditions and lessen the extreme changes in that direction in this case the extra humidity will be welcomed.

Please Maintain Your Fixtures!

If you have a plugged or slow draining Tub, Sink or Toilet, please get them fixed! It is difficut to impossible to clean the bottom of a tub or sink if the water does not drain in a normal fashion. Too slow and the dirt falls out of the water causing us to have to clean it 2 or more times and if you plug a toilet and we dont see a note, you are going to regret it big time!

How We Calculate Our Cleaning Estimates

The following is only a reference as to how we calculate our estimates – not actual available hourly rates!

First, two things to consider before contacting us:

We have a minimum stop of $110.00 per visit for homes and $120 per visit for apartments (at our discretion).

We DO NOT do single visits.

Some of the factors that change the estimate:

Interval of cleaning (every week, every two weeks every 4 weeks)
Distance to your home
Number and type of pets
Amount of clutter present when we come to clean
Square footage of the area to be cleaned
Condition of the home to be cleaned
Types of flooring and floor covering
Bath and kitchen fixtures
Finishes of appliances, cabinets and counter tops
If it is an apartment or a house
Location and parking availability
Use of non-standard cleaning supplies and equiptment requested by the client