I Own A Cleaning Company. Half The Deep Clean You’re Paying For Takes Ten Minutes.

i own a cleaning company. deep cleans are a real service and i am not about to talk anyone out of booking one, because the reason people book them is that the house got away from them and they need someone to come reset it. that is worth money and i charge for it.

but there is a category of line item on a deep clean that i have always felt a little strange about. it took eleven minutes. it required no skill, no ladder, no strength, and no knowledge except which bottle to pick up. you paid a professional rate for a chore, not for expertise.

so here is that list. this is the stuff i would rather you just did, written by someone whose business technically does slightly worse for having told you.

the shower door

this is the single most common thing i get asked to “fix” and about half the time it cannot be fixed, because it is not dirt. hard water leaves mineral deposits on glass, and if those deposits sit long enough they etch the surface. etched glass is physically pitted. no product removes it because there is nothing sitting on top to remove.

the deposits that have not etched yet come off with a mild abrasive and some patience. Bar Keepers Friend is the one i would reach for — it is oxalic acid plus a fine abrasive, which is the right combination for mineral scale, and it is a few dollars. make a paste, leave it on the glass for a minute, work it with a damp cloth, rinse completely. that is the whole job. it is not a technique. i did not go to school for it.

what actually keeps the door clear is the boring part nobody does: getting the water off the glass before it dries. a squeegee that hangs in the shower — and i mean hangs in the shower, not under the sink where it will die — takes about twenty seconds after you get out. i would buy the one with a hook for exactly this reason. the squeegee is not better than the ones without hooks. the hook is the thing that makes you use it.

the washing machine

if your machine smells, that is biofilm, and biofilm is mostly a detergent problem. i have written a whole thing about why more detergent is making your towels worse, so i will not redo it here. the short version is that soap residue is food.

a washer cleaning tablet run on a hot empty cycle is the category pick here and it is what i would use. but the part that actually does the work is free: pull back the rubber gasket on a front loader and wipe out the fold. that is where the smell lives. every single time. i have never once opened a smelly front loader and found the gasket clean.

leave the door open between loads. that is it. that is the maintenance plan.

the garbage disposal and the drain

people call a disposal “broken” when it is just coated. the grinding chamber and the splash guard build up a layer that smells, and running lemon peels through it does approximately nothing except make a citrus-scented version of the same smell.

Disposal cleaning tablets foam up and scrub the chamber, which is the thing lemon peels are not doing. flip the splash guard up and scrub the underside while you are there — it is the dirtiest part of most kitchens and nobody has ever looked at it.

a slow bathroom drain is almost always hair, sitting about four inches down. a plastic drain snake costs a couple of dollars, takes thirty seconds, and is genuinely revolting in a way that is weirdly satisfying. this is the one on the list where paying someone feels most absurd to me, because there is no version of this that is hard. it is just gross. you are paying for the gross.

the carpet spot

the reason a pet spot comes back three days after you clean it is that you cleaned the carpet and not the pad underneath. the stain lifts. the source does not.

an enzyme cleaner is the category that actually addresses this, because enzymes break down the proteins rather than masking them. this is the one i would buy. the instruction people skip is the only instruction that matters: saturate it properly, more than feels reasonable, and then leave it alone. the enzymes need time and moisture to work. blotting it dry after four minutes is how you get a spot that returns.

the labor here is fifteen seconds of pouring and then waiting. you are very good at waiting. you do not need me for this.

the trash can

if a kitchen smells and the trash is empty and it still smells, it is the can itself. bags leak and nobody notices and the residue sits in the bottom corner for eight months.

fill it with hot water in the driveway, add a scoop of an oxygen-based odor remover, let it sit an hour, dump it, dry it upside down in the sun. this is a category recommendation rather than something i can tell you i have used a hundred tubs of, but the mechanism is right and it is what i would grab. total hands-on time: about four minutes, most of which is carrying a trash can.

the two things i actually use, for what it’s worth

most of the list above is me telling you what i would buy. these two are in my actual kit, which is a different claim and i try to be careful about the difference.

Viva paper towels, because they are cloth-like enough to not shred on glass, and microfiber cloths from the automotive aisle, which are meaningfully better than the ones sold for household cleaning and usually cheaper per cloth. car people are fussier about scratching glass than cleaning-product marketers are. that is the entire reason.

what i would still pay someone for

i am not arguing you should never hire a cleaner. i am arguing you should hire one for the things that are genuinely hard, not the things that are merely unpleasant.

worth paying for: anything on a ladder, inside of windows above the first floor, an oven that has reached the archaeological stage, baseboards and trim throughout a whole house, and a move-out clean where the standard is not “clean” but “a stranger with a clipboard agrees it is clean.” those take hours and technique and a tolerance for detail that most people run out of at the halfway point.

not worth paying for: the six things above. that is maybe forty minutes of actual work and under fifty dollars of product that will last you a year.

the pattern underneath all of this is the same one i keep running into, which is that the expensive repair is almost always a cheap chore you skipped. the ten-minute version and the three-hundred-dollar version are usually the same job at different stages.

also, and i say this with love: you cannot smell your own house. so some of this you are not going to believe applies to you until someone else mentions it.

this post contains affiliate links, which means i earn a commission if you buy through them at no extra cost to you. i have flagged which products i actually use and which ones are category picks i would buy but cannot claim years of experience with — those are two different things and i would rather say so than let you assume. #ad #WalmartPartner