Our team is based in Norfolk

Older Norfolk houses take more time

Norfolk has a lot of old houses. In Ghent and Colonial Place, many were built about a century ago. A lot of them still have plaster walls and heavy wood trim around tall windows. They are good houses to live in, but they have far more ledges than a newer build, and every ledge holds dust. Think of picture rails, window casings, stair spindles and the tops of door frames.

When those ledges get skipped, the dust does not stay there. A ceiling fan or an open window moves it, it settles on the floor you just cleaned, and the room looks dull again within days. Old hardwood has its own problem. Grit caught between the boards grinds at the finish every time someone walks on it. Too much water on an old finish can leave it cloudy.

So on an older house we work from the top of the room down. Ceiling fans and high trim come first, then the walls and door knobs. The floors come last, so nothing falls on them once they are clean. Rugs get vacuumed, and hard floors get vacuumed before they are mopped, so the mop is not pushing grit around. When a room is finished, the team takes a photo of it and sends it to you.

• Ceiling fans dusted before anything else
• Walls and door knobs wiped by hand
• Interior windows cleaned on every floor
• Rugs vacuumed and hard floors mopped
• A photo of each room sent to you

Norfolk weather adds work inside the house

Norfolk has water on almost every side, and the summers are long and damp. That moisture shows up in bathrooms first. A shower that never fully dries grows dark spots of mildew along the grout and caulk. A small bathroom without an exhaust fan gets it fastest. Humidity also makes dust cling. It sticks to walls and cabinet fronts, and wiping it dry just smears it around.

Ceiling fans run from spring into fall here, and the blades collect a gray fuzz that drops onto beds and floors when the fan starts. In spring there is a second mess. Pine pollen coats porches and window sills in a yellow film, then comes inside on shoes and through open windows. If you sweep it, it smears across hard floors. It needs to be vacuumed up first and mopped after, and the sills need a wet wipe.

Near the water, the dirt is different. In Ocean View and Willoughby, bay sand comes in on shoes and beach towels and works down into rugs. On streets near the Hague and the Lafayette River, high tides can put water over the road, and people track wet grit inside. Salt air also leaves a haze on glass that faces the bay. We clean exterior windows as well as interior ones, and entry floors and rugs get extra time.

Many Norfolk homes are rentals

Norfolk is a Navy town and a college town. Navy families stationed here move when their orders change, and students near Old Dominion and Norfolk State move out when the school year ends. Each move leaves a unit that has to be clean before the next lease starts. We clean units between tenants for landlords and property managers, and we do move-out cleans for renters leaving a lease.

A move-out clean covers the places people stop looking at while they live somewhere. We clean inside the oven and the microwave, wipe out the kitchen cabinets, wash scuffs off the walls and clean the trash bins. A landlord checks those spots on a walk-through. They are also the spots that get missed when someone is loading a truck on the last day. One customer who booked a move-out clean wrote that they "got pictures and updates" along the way.

We also clean for real estate agents. That includes pre-listing cleans before a house is photographed and shown. One realtor wrote in a Google review. It said, "As a local realtor I’ve worked with many cleaning companies and they definitely set the bar high." A real estate client owns multifamily buildings. They wrote, "We use Maid it on all of our multifamily and residential cleans." An owner who lives out of town can check the work in the room photos. They do not have to drive over.

Getting a price in Norfolk

Call (757) 831-0333 or request an online estimate, and tell us the size of the home and the kind of cleaning you want. A long-overdue deep clean is a bigger job than a regular visit, so the more you tell us, the closer the estimate. You get a free quote before we start. One homeowner wrote that Alina "reviewed the online quote which had been generated" and then came out to the house to look. We are open 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Monday to Sunday.