A-1 Quality Cleaning

You should not. The house we walk into on a first visit is the house you actually live in, and that is the one we need to see. Shoes by the back door, mail on the counter, the laundry basket that never made it upstairs. None of it changes a thing about what we do.

So we start with a walk. Room by room, with you, and you point. Most people run out of things to say by the third room and then remember the real one at the front door on the way back: the shower glass that has gone cloudy, the stair carpet, the inside of the microwave. Every house has one thing that has been bothering somebody for months. Tell us that one first.

Then we work, and a first clean usually runs longer than the ones after it. That visit is where the baseboards, the door frames, the top of the fridge and the corners of the shower get caught up. Once a house is caught up, holding it there is a different and easier job.

We are here Monday through Saturday, 8:30 to 5:30. You can stay, you can leave, you can be on a call upstairs the whole time — plenty of our houses are empty when we are in them and it makes no difference to us. Before you decide it went well, though, look at it. If something is not right, it gets redone at no extra cost.

Who calls us, from Geist to Castleton

Eighteen years in the same towns and you can usually tell who is on the phone before they finish the sentence.

One is the man who runs his own business. Home at seven with the truck still loaded, a house he was proud to buy, and he has not actually sat down in his own living room in a month. He does not need advice about organizing. He needs it handled on a Thursday so Saturday belongs to him.

Then the families. Two kids in something after school, and the kitchen counter is where everything in the house comes to rest. What those houses get from us is not really the cleaning. It is that every other Wednesday the bathrooms and the floors are somebody else's job, and nobody has to argue about whose turn it was.

We also clean for people who kept their own house spotless for forty years and cannot get down on their knees for a tub anymore. That is a hard thing to say out loud to somebody you just met. You do not have to say it. Give us the rooms and we will do the rooms.

Whoever works from home has it worst, honestly. They sit and look at the same baseboard for eight hours.

Offices too — the six-person kind, a waiting room and two bathrooms, out around Castleton and Lawrence and right here in town. Those we do during the day or on a Saturday morning, whichever gets in your people's way less.

We switch products if you ask

We carry both, and you are the one who chooses. Most people do not know that is even a question they get to answer, so we ask it on the first call.

With a baby in the house it is not a hard call. A crawling baby cleans your floor with both hands and then puts them in his mouth. Same idea with a dog that spends the afternoon pressed against the baseboard. Those houses get the eco products and we do not make a production out of it.

If somebody at home cannot take strong smells, say so in the first sentence. A lot of people believe the sharp smell is the proof that a house got cleaned. It is not. It is just the smell.

We will also tell you when the regular products are the better tool for the job. Glass shower doors around here film over no matter how careful anybody is, and on a door that has been filming for a year the gentle bottle mostly moves it around.

Whichever you pick, it goes in writing and it stays that way. You should not have to say it twice, and you should not walk in one afternoon to a smell you told us about back in March.

Road salt does not sweep off. It has to be washed.

Two seasons put the most into a Fishers house, and they could not be more opposite.

Ragweed climbs all through August and peaks around the middle of September, which is exactly when everybody here finally wants the windows open again after a summer of low eighties and sticky. It comes in through the screens and settles where dust settles: sills, blinds, the top edges of the fan blades, the shelf nobody looks at. In September we spend more time up high and on window sills than in any other month of the year.

Winter flips it. Salt and grit off the street ride in on boots, into the entry tile and straight up the stair carpet, and it is that pale gritty stuff that dulls a floor if it sits there. January mornings run in the low twenties, the snow comes and goes all season, and every melt sends another round of it through the front door.

Spring is its own problem, and the reason is the clay. The ground here holds water instead of draining it, so the mud that gets tracked in is heavy and it dries pale on carpet rather than brushing off.

Houses over on the water pick up more than everybody else. The screens face the reservoir, the sliding door track fills with grit, and that patio door is open all summer long.

It is why a lot of our houses run every two weeks most of the year and tighten up to weekly through September and the muddy end of March. Others do fine on monthly. The house tells you which one you are.

Eighteen years of first phone calls

After eighteen years of them, the most common way a first call starts is with an apology.

People apologize for their house before they have even said their name. We have never once hung up the phone and thought about somebody's kitchen. It is a kitchen. We have been in thousands of them, and yours is not the one we are going to remember.

The second thing we hear is: I do not even know what to ask for. You do not have to know. Describe what is bugging you and we will tell you what it is called — a one-time clean, a deep clean, every two weeks, a move-out.

Some people decide their house is too small or too ordinary to hire anybody. Plenty of the houses on our list are ordinary houses that get finished in a morning.

The one people put off longest is the move-out. Three days before the walk-through, truck loaded, fridge unplugged, and now the place has to look like nobody ever lived in it. We do those. Earlier is easier on everybody, but we have handled a lot of them at the last minute.

And nothing has to be decided on that first call. Ask what you want to ask, tell us about the house, then go think about it. We are not going to keep calling you. Most of the work we have right now came from somebody who tried us once and just never called anyone else.

What people ask us