We clean houses all over Wenham

Wenham's antique houses need careful cleaning

A lot of Wenham's housing is old. Drive up Main Street past the town hall and the museum and you pass colonials and farmhouses that have stood for centuries. Plenty of them still have wide pine floors and windows split into small panes. Off the main roads, newer colonials sit back on wooded lots at the end of long driveways. We clean both kinds of house, and they take different work.

Those wide pine boards are the first thing we slow down for. Old boards shrink over the years and open up gaps, and grit settles into every one of them. If you run a wet mop over that floor, the water runs into the seams and the wood can swell or stain. So we vacuum the gaps first, then go over the boards with a mop wrung out until it is barely damp.

Windows in older houses take longer than you would think. Each small pane has its own corners where dust and dead bugs collect, and the wood strips between the panes need wiping too. Interior and exterior window cleaning is on our list, so tell us if you want them done. In the newer houses the time goes elsewhere, mostly to bigger kitchens and extra bathrooms, and we plan the visit around that.

• Vacuum the gaps in wide pine floors first
• Mop old boards with a nearly dry mop
• Wipe small window panes inside and out on request
• Dust door frames and wall hangings by hand
• Clean ceiling fans and mini blinds in every room

Winter salt ends up on your floors

Wenham winters bring snow, and the roads and driveways get salt and sand to deal with it. All of that comes into the house on boots. Salt dries into a white film on entry tile and on the wood floor just inside the door. Sand is worse. Every step grinds it into the finish, and by the end of winter it can dull the boards.

Spring has its own mess. When the snow melts, driveways and paths turn to mud for a few weeks, and it gets tracked in the same way the salt did. Then the pollen starts. Wenham has a lot of woods, and in late spring a yellow dust settles on window sills and in the tracks of sliding patio doors. Leave a window open on a dry day and it gets onto the furniture too.

Seasonal cleaning is on our Google listing, and a Wenham house gives you good reason to book it. At the end of winter we take the salt off the entry floors and clean out the patio door tracks. Once the pollen is done, we wipe the sills and clean the windows if you want them. If you already have us on a recurring schedule, those jobs get added to your regular visit that season.

Renovation dust gets into every room

Plenty of old houses in Wenham get renovated at some point. A kitchen gets redone, or a wall comes out between rooms. The dust from that work is fine enough to float, and it does not stay in the room where the work happened. It settles on top of door frames and on every flat surface, and it keeps turning up for days after the contractor leaves.

Post construction clean up is one of the services on our listing, and it is a different job from a regular clean. We start high and work down, so dust knocked off a door frame lands on a floor we have not cleaned yet. Patricia Weibel wrote: "Called for a one-time clean after renovations and they handled all the dust and leftover mess without complaining."

A deep clean also makes sense when a house changes hands. Move-in and move-out cleaning is on our list, and an empty house lets us reach what furniture usually hides. That means the inside of the oven and the microwave, plus the floor along the walls where a bed or a couch sat. Foreclosure cleaning and trash out are on the list too, for a house nobody has lived in for a while.

Getting a price in Wenham

Call us at (617) 803-6705, or ask for an estimate through this page. Tell us about your Wenham house and whether you want a one-time clean or regular visits. We offer online estimates, and you get the price in writing before any work starts, so you know exactly what the visit covers.