Cleaning Notes

Ask any facility manager why they changed cleaning companies and you will hear the same story. It was great at first. Then it slipped. Then nobody could get anyone on the phone about it.

What almost always happened is that nothing was ever written down. The walkthrough produced a price and a handshake, and everything after that ran on memory — the crew's memory of what they were told once, and your memory of what you thought you were buying. Those two drift apart within a quarter.

A scope of work fixes that by being boring and specific. Every area, every task, every frequency. Restrooms nightly. Baseboards monthly. High dusting quarterly. Glass entry doors every visit. It is not a legal document so much as a shared checklist, and it means an inspection is a factual exercise rather than an argument about what was implied in a meeting eighteen months ago.

It also protects the cleaner. When a client's needs grow — a new suite, a second restroom, a change of hours — a written scope makes that a visible conversation and a revised price, instead of extra work quietly absorbed until the crew starts cutting corners elsewhere to make the time back.

When you get quotes, ask each company for their scope in writing before you sign. If a company will not put the frequencies on paper, you are not comparing prices — you are comparing guesses.

Two quotes for the same floor, one half the price of the other, both saying strip and wax. The difference is nearly always in what is not written down.

Coats. A proper job lays four to five coats of finish. A cheap job lays two or three. Two coats will look glossy on the night and start showing traffic lanes within weeks, because there is not enough sacrificial finish above the tile to take the wear.

Neutralising. Stripper is alkaline. If the floor is not neutralised and rinsed properly, the residue attacks the new finish from underneath and it fails — peeling, powdering or going cloudy. This step takes time and is completely invisible on the quote.

Cure time. Each coat needs to dry before the next goes down, and the finished floor needs to harden before traffic returns. A crew that promises you can walk on it in an hour is planning to skip that, and you will see it in a month.

Edges and corners. Machines do the open floor. Edges, corners and around fixtures are hand work, and they are the first thing dropped when a job is underpriced — which is why so many re-done floors have a dark border.

So when you compare quotes, ask three questions: how many coats, how long between them, and is edge work included. A floor stripped properly should hold up for a year or more with only a scrub-and-recoat in between. A floor stripped cheaply is a bill you pay again next season.

The single most common way money gets wasted on a new build-out is calling the cleaner in before the trades are genuinely finished.

It happens because the space looks close. The paint is up, the fixtures are in, and there is a handover date approaching. So the cleaner comes in, does a full final clean, and then a trim carpenter comes back for a half-day of touch-ups and the whole space needs doing again.

Drywall dust is the reason it is so unforgiving. It is fine enough to hang in the air for hours and it settles on every horizontal surface overnight. A space cleaned at 6pm has a visible grey film by 8am if anyone has been cutting in it. That is not a cleaner cutting corners — it is physics.

Which is why post-construction cleaning is staged. A rough clean clears debris and makes the site workable for the finishing trades. The final clean is the full detail once those trades are genuinely out. A touch-up clean immediately before handover catches whatever settled overnight.

Book early, but book the schedule, not the date. Tell your cleaner when the trades are due out and let them plan the stages around it. The touch-up pass is a fraction of the cost of a second final clean, and it is the difference between a handover that is finished and one that is nearly finished.