We clean homes all over Portsmouth

Older Portsmouth houses take careful cleaning

Portsmouth is full of old houses. Olde Towne is known for its historic homes, and Park View and Port Norfolk have whole streets of houses more than a century old. Tall ceilings. Painted wood trim on nearly every wall. Every window sill and baseboard holds dust, and a quick swipe with a duster only lifts it into the air. It'll settle right back down by dinner. We wipe trim by hand. Then we work each room from the top down, so the dust falls where the vacuum picks it up.

Floors are where a careless crew does the most harm in an old house. Old wood floors have small gaps between the boards. Water that sits in those gaps swells the wood, and you can't undo that with a mop. So on original floors we use a damp mop, never a soaking one. Plaster walls need care too. Old paint on plaster can lift if you scrub it hard, so when a wall needs washing we try a small hidden spot first.

Not every house here is that old. Cradock went up as a planned neighborhood for shipyard workers during the First World War, and its houses are smaller and closer together. Churchland, on the west side of the city, is mostly newer houses on suburban streets. Whatever you've got, the first clean takes longer than the regular visits after it. That's normal. It's catching up on everything that built up before we got there.

• Painted trim and baseboards wiped by hand
• Old wood floors damp mopped, never soaked
• Ceiling fans dusted before the floors get done
• Window sills and inside glass wiped clean
• Shower grout and tub caulk scrubbed every visit

Humid air and pine pollen get inside

Walk a block from the water in Olde Towne on an August afternoon and you'll feel it: the air's thick and wet. The Elizabeth River wraps around much of Portsmouth, and a lot of the city sits low. That damp settles in the spots that never fully dry, mostly the shower grout and the caulk around the tub. Left alone, the gray film there turns into black mildew that works into the grout. Then it's hard to lift. Scrubbing the shower every visit keeps it from getting that far.

Spring has its own mess. The pine trees around Portsmouth drop a yellow coat of pollen on every car and porch for weeks. Some blows in through the window screens. More comes in on shoes. It collects on the sills and on top of ceiling fan blades, where nobody looks. We clean the fan blades and wipe the sills. Skip the fan and it'll throw that pollen right back around the room.

Houses that face the river get something else: a haze on the outside glass. Damp air off the water carries a little salt, and it dries on the windows. We'll clean outside windows as well as inside ones if you want them done. Between our visits, run the bathroom fan after each shower and leave the shower door open. A stall that dries out grows a lot less mildew, and the next clean goes further.

Many Portsmouth families move on military orders

Despite the name, the Norfolk Naval Shipyard sits in Portsmouth, and so does the Navy's medical center. A lot of families here move when new orders come through. A move-out clean is a different job from a weekly one. The rooms are empty, so every scuff on the floor and every drip inside a cabinet is out in the open. We clean inside the kitchen cabinets and the oven, then do the floors where the furniture stood.

Plenty of Portsmouth houses are rentals, and a landlord needs each one clean before the next tenant gets the keys. We clean between tenants for property managers, and we do pre-listing cleans for agents getting a house ready to sell. An empty room shows every handprint, so walls get washed when they need it. Jenn Lamb, a realtor, wrote: "As a local realtor I’ve worked with many cleaning companies and they definitely set the bar high."

Sometimes you've already left town by the time the move-out clean happens. You still get to see the house. "After cleaning each room they take a photo and send them all to you," wrote Pamela Abad. That helps when you're handing back keys from a new duty station, or when a landlord wants to check the unit. "Used this company for a move-out cleaning and they did a wonderful job," wrote Elyssa Philip.

Getting a price in Portsmouth

Call (757) 831-0333 or request an estimate online. Tell us where the house is in Portsmouth and what kind of clean it needs, like a deep clean or a move-out. You'll get a free quote before we start, so you know the price up front. We're open seven days a week, from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon.