We clean offices on a set schedule

Every visit follows the same checklist

An office clean runs top to bottom and dry to wet. Trash and recycling come out of every room first. How full each bin is shows us which rooms got the most use since the last visit. Dust comes off the high places next, like shelf tops, frames, monitor edges and the tops of cubicle walls. Desks and counters get wiped after that, since dust knocked down later would land on a clean surface. Floors go last, every time.

On desks we wipe the surface that is clear and leave papers where they sit. Moving someone's stack to wipe under it is how a signed form ends up in the wrong pile. The spots every hand touches get wiped on each visit: door handles, light switches, drawer pulls and copier buttons. Those small spots are where an office starts to feel grimy, long before the floor looks dirty.

Skip a step and the office shows it inside a week. Floors mopped before the dusting pick up a gray film by the afternoon. A break room counter wiped with the cloth that just did the restroom carries germs from one room to the other. That is why the order never changes. It also lets you check our work. The same list gets done the same way on every visit, so a missed spot stands out.

• Trash and recycling emptied in every room
• Door handles and light switches wiped down
• Break room counters and microwave cleaned
• Restrooms cleaned and dispensers refilled
• Carpet vacuumed and hard floors mopped last

Break rooms and restrooms need extra care

The break room gets dirtier than any other room in an office, and most of that is food. Coffee drips down the cabinet under the machine. Soup splatters inside the microwave and dries hard by the end of the day. Mugs pile up in the sink and leave a greasy film on the basin. We clean the microwave inside and out and scrub the sink and faucet. Then the counters, tables and the front of the fridge get wiped, handle included.

Restrooms are where a skipped visit shows first. Summers around Morrisville are hot and humid, and a restroom with no window holds on to that moisture. Grout lines darken. The base of the toilet starts to smell. A floor drain nobody uses can dry out and let sewer gas back up into the room. We clean toilets and urinals from the handle down to the floor bolts, wipe partitions and mirrors, and pour water into dry floor drains.

A clean restroom has no smell at all. That is different from a restroom that smells like air freshener, and staff can tell the two apart right away. Spraying fragrance over a dirty floor is a common shortcut in office cleaning, and it never lasts past lunch. Paper towel, toilet paper and soap dispensers get refilled on each visit. Who keeps the supply closet stocked gets settled at the walkthrough, so nobody finds an empty roll on a Thursday afternoon.

Red clay and pollen get tracked in

Most of the ground around Morrisville is red clay, and red clay does not stay outside. It rides in on shoes after every rain and grinds into the carpet along the path from the front door to the nearest desk. Dry clay vacuums up fine. Wet clay pressed into carpet tile leaves an orange stain, and a wet mop just spreads it across a hard floor. Entry mats get vacuumed or shaken out on each visit. A mat packed with grit stops catching dirt, and the next pair of shoes carries it inside.

Spring brings the pine pollen. For a few weeks the Triangle turns yellow, and the dust settles on window sills and on desks near the doors. It comes in on coats and through every door that opens. A dry cloth only pushes pollen around, so sills and ledges get a damp cloth during pollen season. Offices with a lot of front glass often want the windows done once the pollen stops. Window cleaning is one of the services we offer.

Summer thunderstorms are common in the afternoon, and wet shoes carry water well past the mat. Carpet near the door stays damp and dark, and in a humid building it can start to smell musty. Regular vacuuming handles the day to day. When the walking lanes in a carpet turn gray and stay gray after vacuuming, that carpet needs a deeper wash. Carpet cleaning is a separate service we also do, and we will tell you when a lane has reached that point.

We walk your office before we quote

Before we quote an office, we come out and walk the space with you. We look at every room and every floor, and we count the restrooms and sinks. We ask how the break room gets used and which days the office is busiest. Two offices of the same size can need very different visits. A dental suite and a sales office get dirty in different ways. The walkthrough tells us which kind of office you have.

Offices around Morrisville come in a few common types. Near RTP and the airport, many are one or two story office park buildings with drop ceilings. The work areas usually have carpet tile, and the break room has vinyl plank. Flex buildings put a front office ahead of a warehouse, and warehouse dust drifts forward into the desks. In the older parts of Cary and Apex, some small offices sit in houses that were built as homes, with hardwood floors and older windows.

Each of those floors gets cleaned a different way. Carpet tile needs a vacuum that picks up well along the edges, since dirt packs into the seams between tiles. Vinyl plank takes a damp mop and very little water, because water that sits in the joints can lift the edges over time. Old hardwood gets a dry dust mop and a barely damp pass. The walkthrough settles all of that before the first visit, so the first clean is done the right way.