We clean from the ceiling down

Our post construction cleaning covers every room

Post construction cleaning happens after the builder or remodel crew packs up and before your furniture goes back in. Even after a sweep, a fine layer of drywall dust sits on nearly every surface in the house. It settles on top of door frames and inside cabinet boxes, and it coats window tracks and the blades of every ceiling fan. Our job is to clear all of it, along with any debris left behind, so the house is ready to live in.

Order matters more than anything else on this job. Dust falls, so we start with the ceiling fans and light fixtures and work down the walls to the baseboards. Loose dust gets vacuumed off before anything gets wet. Drywall dust is mostly sanded joint compound. When water hits it, it turns into a thin paste that smears across paint and dries as a white film. Floors come last in every room, since everything above them sheds onto them while we work.

When it is done right, a dark cloth wiped across a cabinet shelf comes back clean. Cabinets and drawers get vacuumed inside before they are wiped, because a damp rag just pushes dust into the corners of the box. Switch plates and outlet covers get wiped too. Window glass gets cleaned, and so do the tracks under it, which fill with grit during a build. The floors get vacuumed and then washed.

• Ceiling fans and light fixtures dusted first
• Walls and trim wiped down by hand
• Cabinets and drawers vacuumed out, then wiped
• Window glass and tracks cleaned of dust
• Floors vacuumed first, then washed

Fine drywall dust needs more than one pass

Sanding drywall throws dust so fine that it hangs in the air for hours before it lands. A room can look clean in the afternoon and have a pale film on the counters by the next morning. That is the dust that was still floating when the first wipe happened. So one pass through the house is never the whole job. The flat surfaces need a second wipe once the air has had time to settle.

The heating and air system is the other place this dust ends up. If it ran while the walls were being sanded, the return pulled dust into the filter and into the ducts. Some of it blows back out through the vents the next time the system kicks on. We wipe the vent covers and the return grille as part of the job. A fresh filter after the cleaning keeps the system from pushing the same dust around the house for weeks.

Skipped steps show up fast. A wet rag on a dusty wall leaves streaks that look like cloudy paint, and they take a second wash to lift. A regular household vacuum is not built for this either. The fine dust clogs its filter or blows right back out the exhaust. On new carpet, drywall dust that gets walked in works down into the fibers where a vacuum will not reach. That carpet needs a proper carpet cleaning once the walls and trim are done.

Houses around Morrisville bring their own problems

The ground around Morrisville is red clay. On a new build the yard stays bare dirt until the sod goes down, so every trade carries clay inside on their boots. Dry clay dust settles into grout lines and along the edges of the carpet. Wet clay leaves orange smears across new floors and stair treads. We vacuum the dry clay before any mop touches the floor. A wet mop on top of clay only spreads the color and pushes it deeper into the grout.

Summer here is humid, and a house under construction often sits with the doors open and the air off. Damp air makes drywall dust cling to walls and glass instead of wiping off clean. In spring the problem is pollen. Pine pollen drifts in through open doors and lands in window tracks and on sills in a yellow coat. It smears when it gets wet, so it gets vacuumed out of the tracks before the glass is washed.

Many of the newer houses around Morrisville and Cary are two story wood frame homes and townhomes with tall foyers and open stairwells. Dust lands on every stair spindle and on window ledges well above head height. Those high spots take a tall ladder and extra time, and they are easy to miss. Older brick ranch houses in Raleigh bring a different problem. A remodel there often happens while the family lives in the other rooms. Dust gets past the plastic sheeting, so the rooms next to the work need a cleaning too.

New finishes scratch if you clean them wrong

New windows arrive with stickers on the glass, and by move in day they usually carry paint specks and drywall mud too. Dragging a dry rag across that glass grinds the grit into it and leaves fine scratches that show in the afternoon sun. The glass gets soaked first so the grit loosens. Stickers and specks come off once they are soft, and only then does the glass get washed and dried. A scratch in new glass does not come out, so we take our time on this step.

Floors need the same care. Luxury vinyl plank and hardwood are common in new builds and remodels around here, and both scratch when grit gets dragged under a mop. Every floor gets vacuumed before it gets a damp mop, never a soaking one, because standing water works into the seams of wood. Scrub pads stay away from new faucets and appliance fronts. Those finishes mark easily, so they get a soft cloth and a mild cleaner instead.

Fresh paint needs gentle cleaning. Latex paint feels dry within hours, but it takes weeks to fully harden. Hard scrubbing on a new wall leaves a shiny patch that only a repaint will cover. So new walls get a soft cloth that is barely damp. Along the way we sometimes find things the builder should fix, like a paint drip on trim or a chipped countertop. We point those out so you can add them to the builder's list of fixes before the final walkthrough.

The cleaning goes last, after every trade

The cleaning should happen after the last trade is finished. If the painter comes back for touch ups, the dust starts over and so does the cleaning. Builders often do a rough clean before they hand over the keys, and that is a different job. It hauls out scraps and sweeps the floors. It does not reach inside the cabinets or up onto the door frames, which is where most of the dust is sitting.

Every build leaves a different amount of mess, so we like to see the house or hear about it before we quote. We can do an assessment first, so the quote matches the real size of the job. Tell us what was built or remodeled and whether the heating and air ran during the work. On the day of the cleaning, the power and water need to be on. We need working lights to see fine dust and running water to wash it away.

Before we leave, we walk every room with a checklist and look at the places dust collects. When you walk through after us, run a hand along a door frame or open a drawer. That is the fastest way to tell a real post construction cleaning from a quick wipe. Camden Bryant wrote in a Google review that the team "really went through their checklist." Three Sixty Cleaning NC is owned by women and based in Morrisville. It has a 4.4 rating from 13 Google reviews.