What makes it deep

A regular clean is about surfaces: the things you see and touch every day. A deep clean is about everything behind and underneath them. The grease film on top of the cupboards. The grout gone grey. Inside the oven. Behind the fridge. Skirting boards washed rather than wiped. The tops of door frames. Light fittings and extractor grilles.

It’s slow work, done in a sequence, and it takes roughly three to four times as long as a maintenance visit. That’s the honest shape of it.

When people book one

Before starting a regular schedule. The most common reason, and the one I recommend — it sets the baseline that fortnightly visits then hold.
Spring. After a peninsula winter of closed windows, wood smoke and damp, most houses want one.
Before guests. Family coming for a week, or a big birthday, and you want the house properly right rather than tidied.
After building work. Fine dust gets into everything and ordinary cleaning just moves it around.
When it’s got away from you. Illness, a new baby, a hard year. It happens to everyone and I’m not going to comment on it.

How long it takes

A small two-bedroom home is usually most of a morning into the afternoon. A three or four-bedroom house with two bathrooms is generally a full day, and sometimes spills into a second. Homes that haven’t had a deep clean in several years take longer than ones that have.

I’d rather quote you accurately after seeing it than guess low over the phone and then have to have an awkward conversation halfway through.

A note on older Port Townsend homes

A lot of the houses here are old, and some of them have original woodwork, painted surfaces and fittings that modern cleaning products will damage. I work more carefully and more slowly in those homes, with gentler products, and I’ll tell you if something is beyond what cleaning can fix rather than scrubbing it until it looks worse.

How often a home needs one

If you have a regular clean, once a year is usually plenty — most people book theirs in spring. Fortnightly visits hold a standard well, but there are jobs that simply never fit inside a maintenance clean, and they accumulate quietly over twelve months.

If nobody cleans the house but you, twice a year is a better rhythm: once in spring and once before the winter shut-in. And if the house has pets, wood heat or damp problems — which around here covers most of them — the deeper jobs come round faster than you’d expect.

How to prepare

Not much, honestly. But two things make a real difference to what I can reach:

Clear the worktops and floors as much as you reasonably can. I clean around belongings rather than moving and reorganising them, so a clear surface gets done properly and a covered one gets done in the gaps.
Tell me what not to touch. Anything fragile, valuable or sentimental — point it out and I’ll leave it alone, or clean around it carefully with you there.

Plan to be out for most of it if you can. It’s noisy, I’ll be moving between rooms constantly, and everyone finds it a bit awkward trying to work at the kitchen table while somebody cleans behind the fridge.

What it costs

Deep cleans are quoted individually, because condition matters far more than square footage. Two identical houses can be a half-day apart depending on how long it’s been.

Quotes are free. Typical deep clean prices by home size are on the pricing page. I’ll walk through, tell you what I’d do and roughly how long it’ll take, and you can decide.

Request a free quote

Deep Cleaning