We clean homes all over Beverly

Old Beverly woodwork holds more dust

Much of the housing in Beverly is old. Downtown around Cabot Street, and out toward the Cove, you find a lot of wood-frame colonials and Victorians. Plenty of them have been split into apartments. Houses like these have wide painted trim around the windows and doors. Each ledge on that trim is a flat shelf where dust lands and stays. An older house simply has more of those shelves than a newer house does.

Skip that trim for a few months and you can see it. Dust packs into the corners of the window casings and turns gray along the top of each door frame. Older houses also move more air through gaps around windows and floorboards, so the dust you missed drifts back onto the tables you just wiped. Mini blinds and framed pictures on the walls catch the same film. None of it looks bad on a single day, but it builds, and then it takes a real deep clean to get back.

So we dust from the top down in these houses. Ceiling fans and door frames come first. The floors get vacuumed last, so nothing falls onto a surface we already cleaned. A big house in Beverly Farms or Prides Crossing has more rooms and more trim than a condo near Beverly Depot. That shows up in how long the job takes, and in the estimate. Tell us what kind of house you have and we will plan the visit around it.

• Ceiling fans and door frames dusted
• Dust cleared off blinds and wall hangings
• Patio doors and door windows cleaned
• Carpets and floors vacuumed
• Beds made and linens changed

Salt air dulls windows near Beverly Harbor

Beverly has a long shoreline, from the harbor by the Salem bridge out past Lynch Park and along to Beverly Farms. Houses close to that water catch the wind off the ocean, and that wind carries a fine salt mist. It dries on glass as a dull haze that plain dusting never touches. You notice it most on the windows and patio doors that face the water, because that is the side the weather hits.

Interior and exterior window cleaning is on our service list, and a house by the water needs it more often than most. Salt film holds on to dirt, so a window left alone gets cloudier after every storm. The same salt settles on sills and in the tracks of sliding doors. It mixes with sand people carry home from Dane Street Beach or West Beach. Left there, that grit wears on the track each time the door rolls open.

Winter brings a different mess. After a nor'easter the streets in Beverly get salted and sanded, and all of it comes inside on boots. It leaves white streaks on the hardwood by the door and grinds into the carpet in the front hall. Vacuuming carpets and floors on a regular visit pulls that grit up before it wears down the finish. When spring comes, a seasonal clean gets the rest of the winter out of the house before the windows go back up.

Some Beverly homes need a deeper clean

Beverly has plenty of rental housing, from apartments in the older multifamily houses downtown to places rented near Endicott College and Montserrat College of Art. When a lease ends, the next tenant expects to walk into a clean unit. Our move-in and move-out cleaning covers the spots a quick wipe skips, like the inside of the oven and the microwave. The laundry room and the other appliances get cleaned as well. If the last tenant left things behind, trash out is on our service list too.

Plenty of older Beverly houses get their kitchens and bathrooms remodeled. The work throws fine dust into every room, including rooms the crew never set foot in. It settles on door frames and on top of cabinets, and it keeps drifting down for days after the job is done. Post construction clean up is on our service list for exactly this. A customer who called us after renovations wrote that "they handled all the dust and leftover mess without complaining."

Other homes just need steady upkeep. Some people in Beverly ride the train into Boston from Beverly Depot. Others work from home. Either way the house gets heavy use during the week, and our recurring cleaning service keeps it from sliding back. A customer wrote: "I work from home and having them come every other week keeps the place manageable." While we are there we can fold laundry and change the linens.

Getting a price in Beverly

Call North Shore Maids at (617) 803-6705, or ask for an estimate online through our website. Tell us where the house is and how big it is, whether that means a condo downtown or a larger place in Beverly Farms. Then tell us if you want a single deep clean or regular visits. We send back a free quote so you know the price before you book. We are open on Saturdays and Sundays as well as weekdays.