AYALA CLEANING SERVICES

We hear it on the phone. Give me a couple of days first. Then we get there and the counters are wiped and the toys are in the bin, and the only things left standing are the things nobody fixes by wiping: the orange line in the grout by the back door, the stair carpet that went from cream to tan, the film along the hallway baseboards.

That is the ground here. The dirt in this county is red and it holds on. It comes in on work boots, on cleats after a game, on the tires of a stroller, and it goes straight into the grout and down into the pile of a light carpet. After a wet week in February it is in the entry of every house on the street, no matter who lives there or how careful they are.

So there is nothing to straighten up for us. Leave the laundry where it is. When we walk in you tell us the two or three things that bother you most and we start there, and whoever is home that day can tell us in English or in Spanish.

You show us the house first

If you have never hired anybody to clean, here is the whole thing from the front door in.

We come between eight and six, Monday through Saturday. The first thing we do is walk the house with you, room by room, and you talk. Some people want the kitchen and the bathrooms and do not care much about the rest. Some people want the baseboards, the fan blades, the top of the door frames and that tall window over the front door that nobody has reached since they moved in.

Then we work from the far end of the house back toward the door, high to low, so nothing that is already done gets walked on again. Floors last. If you want to leave, leave. If you would rather sit there the first time, plenty of people do and it does not slow us down. At the end we walk it once more together, so you are looking at the same rooms we are.

Nothing after that happens automatically. One time is one time. If you want us every week, every two weeks or once a month, we pick the day before we go.

What March does to a carpet

By the middle of March the cars in the driveway are yellow and so is the porch rail.

The pine pollen is the one everybody can see, and it is usually not the one bothering anybody; the oak and the hickory do more of that, and those you never see at all. Either way it rides in on shoes and clothes and the dog, through the door every time somebody opens it, and it settles into carpet and into sofa cushions and stays. Then June comes, the house closes up for the summer, and the air just carries it back around.

That is why we do carpets and upholstery and not only floors. When a family room smells like something and nobody can find where it is coming from, it is almost always down in the fibers and not in the air.

On products, you pick and we bring it. Eco-friendly, biodegradable, hypoallergenic, or the regular strong ones. If there is a baby crawling on that floor, or somebody in the house with asthma, or a dog that licks everything, say so when you write to us and the strong bottles stay in the van that day.

An hour and a half in any direction

We drive up to an hour and a half out of Cumming, so the houses are not much alike: Milton, Alpharetta, Roswell, Suwanee, Dunwoody, Canton, Gainesville, Dahlonega, Atlanta.

A good number belong to people who run something of their own. They are on 400 before it gets light and back home at eight, the house is nice and the bathrooms have not been touched in three weeks, and it sits on them all week.

Then the families, where it is school, practice, dinner, again, and Saturday is the only open day anybody has and nobody wants to give it to the tubs. Then people who are retired, in the older houses out toward the lake, who did all of it themselves for years and are finished with the stairs and the bathtubs. And the one that surprises people: somebody who works from home. Being in the house all day sounds like the house would get done, and then the calendar starts at eight and the vacuum stands by the stairs until Sunday night.

We also turn over short-term rentals, the ones near the lake that empty out Sunday and fill back up Friday, and we clean offices when the office is closed.

Just the kitchen. Just the carpets.

Other people never call because they think their job is too small, or too strange, to bother anybody with.

It is not. The kitchen on its own is a real job and we take it: the oven, the range hood, the fronts of the cabinets, the inside of them if you empty them first. The carpets and the sofa on their own, same answer.

Move-out day on an apartment in Suwanee, when the walls are bare and you want the deposit back. An empty house before the truck arrives. And the one everybody forgets: the week after the contractor leaves, when the basement is finally finished and there is a gray film on every surface and inside every drawer, and normal cleaning only pushes it around. That is its own kind of job and it is one we do.

Asking for one cleaning and nothing after it is a normal thing to ask for. Cash, Zelle or check, and we work in English and in Spanish.

What people ask us