We clean every room top to bottom

We work from the ceiling down

A deep clean starts at the highest point in the room and works down to the floor. Ceiling fan blades come first, then the air vents and the light fixtures, then the tops of the door frames. Whatever comes loose up there drops onto surfaces we have not touched yet. Run it the other way and the dust off a fan blade lands on a counter that was just wiped. That counter then has to be cleaned twice.

Next comes everything at hand height. Blinds get wiped on both sides, because the side facing the glass holds the most dust and nobody notices it until the sun comes through. Window sills and the tracks under sliding windows get vacuumed out, then wiped. Light switches and door handles get scrubbed, along with the paint around them, since hands leave a gray film there that a duster never removes.

Baseboards and floors come last. Every baseboard gets wiped by hand, including the ones behind doors and along the back of the toilet, where a mop head never reaches. Then the floors get vacuumed and mopped with everything above them already clean. In a finished room, you can run a finger along the top of a baseboard or door frame and pick up nothing. That finger test is how you can check our work.

• Ceiling fans and air vents dusted first
• Blinds wiped on both sides
• Baseboards wiped by hand in every room
• Inside of the oven scrubbed clean
• Range hood and its filter degreased

Boise's dry air puts dust on everything

Boise is high desert, and the air stays dry for most of the year. Dry air and dust go together here, and the dust settles on every flat surface, including the ones above eye level. Wind brings in more from open ground and the farm fields across the valley, and it works in around window frames and under doors. A house can look clean at a glance and still have a gray layer on top of the fridge and the kitchen cabinets.

Winter adds its own problem. Once the furnace kicks on, forced air pushes dust through the ducts and out of every vent. Over a winter it can leave dark streaks on the ceiling around the vents. In late summer, wildfire smoke drifts into the valley and leaves a sticky film on blinds and window glass. A deep clean after either season takes that film and dust off before it gets ground into carpet or set into the paint.

Skipping the high work is the usual reason a house feels dusty again a few days after a cleaning. If the fan blades and vent covers still carry dust, it all comes back down the first time the fan spins. The furnace does the same thing to a dusty vent. So we wipe the vent covers themselves, and we clean the underside of each fan blade as well as the top. Leave those out and the dust falls right back onto floors that were just cleaned.

Ovens and range hoods take the longest

In the kitchen, the range hood comes before anything below it. The hood catches grease out of the air every time someone cooks, and the underside and the filter turn sticky and brown. We take the metal filter out and soak it in hot water with a degreaser while we clean the hood itself. The light over the burners gets wiped too, because it holds the same film. Wipe the stovetop first and the drips from the hood land right back on it.

The oven takes more patience than anything else in the house. Spills bake on hard and black, and scraping them off dry can scratch the door glass. So the racks come out to soak, and cleaner goes on the inside walls and the glass. Then we leave it to work while we clean the rest of the kitchen. That wait lets the burned layer lift off with a plastic scraper and a cloth, without hours of scrubbing.

Cabinets come after the stove. The fronts get wiped where hands grab them, and so do the tops of the upper cabinets if they stop short of the ceiling. Grease from cooking floats up and lands there, then dust sticks to it and turns into a gritty paste. Leave it for a year or two and it takes real scrubbing. Caught during a deep clean, it wipes off in a few passes.

Hard water leaves white spots in bathrooms

Much of the water around Boise and Meridian is hard, which means it carries dissolved minerals. When it dries on a surface, those minerals stay behind as white spots and a chalky crust. You see it first on shower glass and around the base of the faucets. It also rings the tub drain and plugs the little holes in the showerhead. An all-purpose spray barely touches it, so these spots get a mineral remover and time to soak.

Bathrooms follow the same order as every other room. The exhaust fan cover and the light over the mirror get dusted first, because damp dust turns to mud. Then the mineral remover goes on the glass and fixtures and sits while we scrub the tile and grout. Toilets get cleaned inside and out, down to the bolt caps at the base and the floor behind them. Mirrors come near the end, so nothing splashes them after they are clean.

Hard water buildup keeps growing if nobody deals with it. A light haze on shower glass comes off with the right cleaner, but over a few years it can etch the glass for good. Soap scum gives the minerals something to grip, so a shower that only gets rinsed builds up faster. A deep clean is the time to clear the glass, before the haze turns permanent. From then on, a squeegee after each shower keeps most of the spots from coming back.

Bungalows and tract homes hide dirt differently

Older houses in Boise's North End, many of them bungalows, carry a lot of wood trim. Wide baseboards and built-in cabinets have ledges and grooves where dust packs in. That trim usually has many coats of old paint on it. We clean it with a damp cloth and a mild cleaner, because a scouring pad would dull it. Original wood floors get vacuumed first, then a mop that is barely damp, because standing water soaks into the gaps between boards.

Newer wood-frame tract homes in Meridian and Kuna get dirty in different spots. Vaulted living rooms put the ceiling fan and the plant ledges well out of reach, so dust sits up there for months. The walls usually have a knockdown texture, and cobwebs cling to it in the upper corners. Most windows have faux wood blinds, and their wide slats hold a thick line of dust along every edge.

Brick ranch houses on the Boise Bench fall between the two. Their older metal sliding windows have deep tracks that fill with grit and dead bugs. A crevice tool pulls most of it out before the tracks get wiped. Some still have popcorn ceilings. We leave those alone rather than scrub them, since scrubbing knocks the texture loose, and older popcorn texture can contain asbestos. Tell us when you book if the house has anything like that, and we will plan around it.