We clean homes across Saint Petersburg

Older Saint Petersburg houses need careful cleaning

Much of Saint Petersburg's oldest housing went up during the Florida land boom. Plenty of it still stands in Old Northeast and Historic Kenwood. These are bungalows and Mediterranean Revival homes with wood floors and original wood windows. They are lovely to live in. They also hold dust in spots a newer house does not have. Deep window sills collect it, and so does the ledge above a tall door. A quick vacuum and a wipe of the counters will miss most of it.

Farther from downtown, the city filled in during the postwar years with concrete block ranch houses. Disston Heights and Shore Acres are full of them. Lots of these homes were built with terrazzo floors, and many owners have pulled up old carpet to get back to them. Terrazzo is made of marble chips set in cement. Vinegar and other acid cleaners etch it and leave dull patches that will not buff out. We keep acid off it and use a neutral cleaner instead.

The order of work matters in these houses. We start high, with ceiling fans and the tops of door frames, and work down to the baseboards and floors. That way nothing falls onto a surface we already cleaned. Old wood floors get a damp mop and never a wet one, because standing water soaks into the seams between boards. A customer who has used Terry for years put it this way: "He finds dirt I didn't even know I had."

• Ceiling fans and door tops dusted before the floors
• Baseboards and door casings wiped by hand
• Old wood floors damp mopped, never soaked
• Terrazzo cleaned without vinegar or acid
• Sliding door tracks vacuumed before the glass

Humid bay air makes bathrooms mildew faster

Saint Petersburg has water on nearly every side, with Tampa Bay to the east and Boca Ciega Bay to the west. The air stays damp most of the year, and summer brings a thunderstorm on many afternoons. Inside, bathrooms are slow to dry out between showers. Mildew shows up first on shower grout and in the caulk around the tub. The next spot is often the ceiling around an air conditioning vent, where cold air meets damp air and leaves small gray spots.

Mildew wipes away easily while it is new. Leave it a few weeks and it works down into grout and old caulk, and then it stains them. At that point scrubbing may only lighten the mark. That is the practical reason to keep bathrooms on a weekly or every-other-week schedule in this climate. The mildew never gets enough time to set in. We scrub the grout lines and the corners of the shower floor on every visit, because that is where it starts.

Houses on Snell Isle and along the Shore Acres canals deal with salt as well. Wind off the bay leaves a hazy film on sliding glass doors, and sand from beach days gets tracked in on feet and towels. Most of that sand ends up in the sliding door track, where it grinds on the rollers each time the door opens. We vacuum the track out before we wipe the glass. If we did it the other way around, the cloth would drag grit across the glass.

We also clean downtown apartments and offices

Downtown Saint Petersburg and the blocks along Central Avenue are full of apartments and condo towers. Tenants in those units come and go often. A move-out clean is a different job from a weekly one. The rooms are empty, so every scuff mark and old drip is out in plain view. A landlord or property manager checks all of it before handing back a deposit. That walk-through is what the clean has to pass.

Moving-related cleaning is one of the services on our Google listing. On a move-out we clean inside the empty cabinets and drawers, then work through the kitchen and bathrooms down to the fixtures. We pay close attention to what a walk-through catches, such as grease on the stovetop and dust along the baseboards. One customer who moved out of an apartment wrote that Terry "made the apartment look like no one ever lived there."

Office and workplace cleaning is on our listing too. Small offices and storefronts in the Edge District and Grand Central tend to need a steady weekly clean more than a big one. Break rooms and restrooms take the hardest use, and in this heat the trash is where smells start. An office client wrote, "He even cleaned our garbage cans!" A commercial property owner said the team has "kept the space clean and neat with weekly maintenance."

Getting a price in Saint Petersburg

Call (727) 748-9665 Monday through Friday, between nine in the morning and five in the afternoon. You can also send us your details through the request form. Tell us which part of Saint Petersburg the job is in and roughly how big the place is. If it is a move-out, say so, because an empty unit takes a different kind of clean. We will give you a free quote before any cleaning starts, so you know the price and what it covers.