House cleaning in Middletown, OH

Cleaning a home in Middletown

Middletown sits on flat ground in the Great Miami River valley, between two bigger cities, and much of its housing is older than the suburbs around it: frame houses with front porches, wood floors and small rooms, plus blocks of mid-century brick. Heat runs here from fall into spring. Then come a few weeks of open windows, and then the humidity arrives and the house shuts again for the summer.

Two long shut-in seasons put the work in the ductwork. A floor register collects whatever gets swept toward it, and the cover has to come up so the boot underneath can be emptied and wiped. The cold-air return loads with lint. Where a window unit does the cooling, its top edge picks up a black stripe. And the open-window weeks leave a gritty film on every sill that needs washing, not dusting.