Post-Construction Cleaning

Construction dust is a different job

People book a regular cleaner after a remodel and are surprised when the house still looks hazy two days later. That isn’t poor work — it’s that drywall dust behaves nothing like household dust and can’t be treated the same way.

Joint compound sanded off a wall breaks down into particles far finer than anything your house produces on its own. It stays airborne for hours, drifts through the whole building, and settles into places ordinary dust never reaches: inside light fittings, down window tracks, into the tops of door casings, through vents, and into every cupboard whether the doors were shut or not.

It also behaves badly when you clean it wrong. Wipe a dusty surface with a damp cloth and you don’t lift the dust — you turn it into a thin paste and smear it, which is exactly why a room can look worse after a quick once-over than it did before.

Why it takes more than one pass

The dust that is still hanging in the air when I arrive will settle over the following day or two. Clean the house perfectly on Monday and by Wednesday there is a visible film again. That is not a failure; it is physics, and any cleaner who tells you one visit will do it is either inexperienced or hoping you won’t notice.

So the work is done deliberately, in order:

1. Top down, dry first. Everything gets vacuumed before anything gets wet — ceilings and corners, light fittings, tops of doors and casings, walls, then down to the floor. Dry removal, so nothing turns to paste.
2. Then wet, in the same order. Once the loose material is gone, surfaces get washed properly, changing water often because dust loads it fast.
3. A second visit a few days later. This catches everything that settled out of the air after the first pass. It is much shorter than the first, and it is the visit that actually makes the house feel finished.

I quote both visits together. The second one is not an upsell — it’s the difference between a house that looks clean and a house that stays clean.

When to book me in

After every trade is finished. Not while the painter is coming back on Thursday, not before the plumber returns to fit the taps. One person doing ten minutes of work after I leave undoes a day of mine.

If a contractor is managing the job, ask them for the date the last trade leaves and book me two or three days after that. If the schedule slips — and it does — tell me as early as you can and I’ll move things around. I keep some flexibility for exactly this reason.

One thing worth knowing: fresh paint takes weeks to fully cure, not days. I work gently on newly painted surfaces and won’t scrub them, because anything more than a light touch in the first month will burnish or mark the finish. If something needs more than that, it needs the painter, not a cleaner.

For contractors and builders

If you build or remodel around here, having one cleaner you can book without thinking about it is worth something. I’m happy to work directly with you rather than the homeowner, invoice you, and coordinate around your schedule instead of theirs.

I’ll also tell you honestly when a job is bigger than one person should take on. A gut renovation with debris still on site needs a crew, and I’d rather say so than take the booking and let you down at handover.

Get in touch and I’ll give you a straight per-project rate you can build into your quotes.

What it costs

Priced per project rather than per visit, because scope varies far more than room count does. The figures below include both passes.

Whole-house work is quoted after a site visit — there is too much variation between a tidy new build and a lived-in house that has been gutted to say anything useful from a chart. Full prices for every service are on the pricing page.

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