Gem Maid Service

Move-out is the one where a house finally tells the truth. With the furniture gone you can see the square where the couch sat, the dust behind the dryer, the closet floors nobody has swept since the boxes went in. Move-in is the opposite problem. There is a truck in the driveway and a hundred things to carry, and the last thing anybody wants that night is to start on somebody else's shower. We do both, and we would rather have the house empty than half packed.

The morning after a party is its own kind of job. The kitchen takes it worst, the counters are sticky in places you do not see until the light hits them, and there is always one bathroom that carried the whole night. If the kitchen is the only room that got hit, we can come and do just the kitchen: the hood filter, the front of the oven, inside the fridge, the grout behind the faucet, and leave the rest of the house alone.

Then there is the visit nobody planned for. Someone is coming to stay, the guest room has been shut since spring, and normal tidying is not going to fix it. That is what a deep clean is for. Baseboards, doors and door frames, inside the cabinets, behind and underneath what does not usually move. It takes longer than a regular visit, so it is worth asking with a little room before the day you actually need it.

None of this has to become an ongoing thing. One time is a real answer, and so is every week, every two weeks, or once a month. Plenty of houses start with one deep clean and decide after.

Winter comes in on everybody's boots

You can tell what month it is by what is on the floor inside the door.

From the first snow until the melt, everything on Route 47 comes into the house on the bottom of a boot. It dries into that pale ring on the entry tile and along the edge of the rug, and since January here does not always climb out of the twenties, it never really lets up. A dry mop just moves it around. It has to be wet down, given a minute, and lifted, and the edge of the tile and the grout are where it hides.

Summer works the other way. When it sits in the high eighties and the air is heavy, the windows stay shut for weeks and the house runs on the air conditioner. The dust that settles then is fine and light, and it goes up: the top of the ceiling fan blades, the return vent, the top edge of the door frames, the shelf above the closet rod. In a two story great room nobody looks up there until somebody is standing in it.

Fall belongs to the fields. Once the combines are out west of town the wind carries what they lift, and it lands on window sills, on screens, and down in the track of the patio door, which is one of those places that never gets touched until it is somebody's actual job.

That is what cleaning only homes gets you. We are not learning offices and warehouses at the same time. We are learning the same handful of places over and over: the switch plates, the rubber gasket around the refrigerator door, the underside of the faucet, the baseboard behind the toilet, the inside of the microwave. And if a room does not come out right, say so and it gets done again at no extra cost.

An hour out from the Route 47 bridge

Yorkville sits right where the subdivisions stop and the fields start, and we work both sides of that line.

Up the Fox: Montgomery, Aurora, North Aurora and Batavia. Right next door: Bristol and Oswego. West on 34: Plano, Sandwich and Somonauk. Out on the farm side: Sugar Grove, Elburn, Big Rock and Hinckley. South and west: Newark and Sheridan. East: Plainfield. About an hour from the bridge in any direction is where we stop.

Those are not the same house. A newer two story in Grande Reserve or Bristol Bay has three bathrooms, a finished basement and a lot of stair, and that work is mostly volume. An older place off Bridge Street has original woodwork, corners that are not square and a bathroom the size of a closet, and that work is mostly patience. Out past Hinckley the driveway is long and the road turns to gravel, and everything that road does ends up in the entryway. We plan for the three of them differently.

If your town is not on that list and you are still inside about an hour of Yorkville, ask anyway. You will get a yes or a no on the phone instead of a maybe.

English, and questions about your stairs

We work in English, on the phone and in the house, so nothing you say about your home gets lost between the call and the day we show up.

The call is short and it is mostly us asking. How many bedrooms and bathrooms. How many floors, and whether the basement counts. Whether you want the whole house or only the kitchen. Whether this is the first big clean or keeping up one you already had. How often, if you want it more than once. And whether there is a room you would rather we left closed, because that is a normal thing to ask for and nobody has to explain it.

Stairs come up because they change the shape of the job. A ranch and a two story with a finished basement can have the same number of bedrooms and still be two different days of work. Same with a house that has had somebody in it every two weeks and a house that has not had a real deep clean in a long time. We would rather hear that on the phone than find it out standing in your kitchen.

So tell us about your home. The more you say, the closer what we bring is to what you were picturing.

What people ask us