What we clean
A home cleaning service covers regular visits (a maid service on a schedule or on request), bigger ones (a deep clean for the parts a regular visit skips and a cleaning after a remodel), and one time visits before guests arrive or after a long gap. Moves and rentals are their own group: move-out cleaning in an empty unit, move-in cleaning on the same page, and turnovers between short-term guests. A green cleaning request is settled on the call with your own products or ones you name, with the City's own guidance in mind. The full list and when each one fits is on the services hub.
What belongs to other trades: carpet and upholstery cleaning, outside windows above the ground floor, pressure washing, duct cleaning, mold work, pest treatment, junk hauling and cleanouts, hoarding and biohazard work, laundry service, and taking away a customer's old cleaning products. Those are different jobs that take different training.
After you call
You tell us about the place: the number of rooms and bathrooms, pets and what kind, the building and how we get in (a buzzer and a code, a doorman with a visitor sheet, a key or a lockbox, a service elevator with a reservation), the stairs or the elevator, when the place was last thoroughly cleaned, products you want used or avoided, and anything to leave alone.
Then the cleaning itself: whether the kitchen or the bathrooms have fallen behind, whether this is a visit on its own or the start of a schedule, and whether anything in the home should be left exactly as it is. The visit respects what you say here. Anything you want us to know about the home belongs on the first call, before the day begins.
If you would rather leave your number than call, the callback form under the phone number takes a name, a number and a short note. We come back to it.
In your home
The visit starts with a walk-through against the details you left. If anything has changed since, this is when we hear about it. Then we go over the plan room by room: what we are cleaning, in what order, and anything we are leaving alone. For a rental between tenants, the walk-through can be with the property manager who has the keys and knows the building's rules; for a lived-in home it is with you, and anything a photograph of the room would show (a plant on a windowsill, a stack of books on an end table) is part of what we see.
The price and the terms are agreed with us before any cleaning starts. From there, dusting works from the floor, nothing climbed, so nothing out of reach has to come down. The kitchen and the bathrooms are the biggest pieces of the job. Floors are the last pass before each room is finished. Whatever we gather gets sorted into the household's own three bins (blue for recycling, green for compost, black for trash), matched to the way the resident already separates them. When you are home for the visit, we end by going back through the rooms with you so anything either side wants to point out gets settled.
Cleaning products are never mixed. Bleach does not meet ammonia, vinegar or another cleaner. If you have products at home you want used, we go over them on the call so nothing comes down to a guess at the door.
San Francisco homes
About 62 percent of the city's households rent, and about 49 percent of the city's housing units are in buildings of five or more units. A cleaning in a tower works through the way the building asks a vendor to come in; a cleaning in a detached house up front stairs starts at the mat.
On the first call, the number of rooms and bathrooms sets the price, and the building decides the way in. The resident tells us what is at the building: a doorman, a service elevator, a loading dock, a key under a mat, a buzzer and a code, or a lockbox.
Everyone in San Francisco is required to separate recyclables, compostables and trash, and a visit ends with what we collected sorted into the home's own three bins. We do not sort for the building, and we make no claim about any household's compliance.
How to check any cleaning company
Use the questions you would ask any company: who comes to the home, how a price is set, what a visit covers, what is left out, what happens if something gets missed, and which products are used. Any Green Business claim can be checked against the California Green Business Network's directory. The guide on hiring a house cleaner walks through what to ask any cleaner before you book.