Office cleaning set around your business hours

Every office visit follows the same order

An office clean starts with the trash. Walking the floor to empty every bin also shows us which desks and corners saw the most use that week. Then the dusting runs from the top down. Ceiling fans and blinds go first, then door frames and the tops of partitions, then desks and window sills. Dust falls as you work. Vacuum the carpet before the blinds are dusted, and that dust lands on a clean floor by morning.

The break room comes next. Most of the smell in an office starts there, so the microwave gets cleaned inside and the counters get wiped down. Restrooms follow the same top to bottom rule, with the mirror first and the floor last. Clean them out of order and you get drips on a floor that was already done. You also get splashes on a mirror that was wiped before the sink. Staff and clients notice a restroom before they notice anything else.

Floors are always last. Carpets get vacuumed along the edges and under the desks, where chair wheels grind grit into the fibers. Hard floors get washed after that. Done right, you walk in the next morning to empty bins and a floor with no tracks across it. When a step gets skipped, it shows up small at first. It is one full bin under a desk, or a sticky ring by the coffee maker that was there last week too.

• Trash emptied at every desk and bin
• Fans, blinds and door frames dusted
• Break room microwave cleaned inside and out
• Restrooms cleaned from the mirror down
• Carpets vacuumed, hard floors washed last

Road salt is hard on office floors

From the first snow until the spring thaw, everyone who comes through your door brings road salt and slush in on their boots. Most of it drops in the first few steps inside. On hard floors the salt dries into a white crust. On carpet it works down into the fibers and leaves a chalky gray patch that spreads out from the entry. A mat catches some of it, and the rest gets walked down the hall to the desks.

Salt does not come up with a quick pass of the vacuum. Hard floors need to be washed, and the water needs changing more often than it would in summer. Otherwise you spread a thin salty film around and the floor dries dull. On entry carpet we vacuum slowly and from more than one direction, so the grit lifts out instead of getting pushed deeper. Skip that for a few weeks in February and the carpet by the door turns gray and stays that way.

The rest of the year has its own problems. Spring pollen blows in through open windows and settles on sills and blinds as a yellow film. North Shore summers get humid, and a closed office with a busy break room can smell by Monday if the trash sat all weekend. Once the heat comes on in the fall, forced air pushes dust around every room. It lands on every flat surface, so dusting matters more in the heating months.

Older buildings around Danvers hold more dust

Plenty of small offices around Danvers and Salem are not in new buildings. Many sit in converted wood-frame colonials or old brick mill and storefront buildings. Others are in one-story plazas with a row of suites. Each one cleans a little differently. A converted colonial has narrow stairs and painted trim around every door and window. A plaza suite is simpler, but its front door opens straight onto the parking lot. The floor by that entry takes all the weather.

Old buildings collect dust in places a new office does not have. Every raised panel on a door and every ledge on the trim holds a thin gray line. Cast iron radiators trap dust between the fins, where a cloth has to be worked in by hand. Exposed brick sheds a fine grit from the old mortar onto the floor below it. None of this looks dirty after one week. It builds up over a month, until someone leans on a door frame and comes away with a gray sleeve.

Older buildings also tend to have more glass at the front, like divided windows, glass entry doors and storefront panes. A client sees the fingerprints on a glass door the moment they walk in, so door glass gets wiped on the visit. We also do interior and exterior window cleaning. Around here that makes sense after the spring pollen, and again before winter when the days get short.

We clean when your office is quiet

Nobody wants a vacuum running during a client meeting. So the first thing we work out is when your space is empty, or quiet enough to clean without getting in anyone's way. That might be early before you open, or after the last person leaves. Our hours are Monday to Friday: Open 24 hours, Saturday: 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, and Sunday: 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM. Call (617) 803-6705 in those hours to set a time that fits your week.

How often you need a visit depends on how the space gets used. A quiet office with a few desks can do fine every other week. A busy office has a break room where people heat lunch every day. It will look tired within a few days. One customer wrote this in a Google review. "I work from home and having them come every other week keeps the place manageable." A home office works the same way. A desk and a kitchen share the same few rooms.

The order of the work stays the same on every visit, from the trash to the dusting to the floors last. What changes is where the extra time goes. Through the winter it goes to the entry and the salt, and in spring it moves to the sills and blinds. If you have a client visit or an inspection coming up, tell us ahead of time. We can put the extra time into the front of the office, where people look first.