Last year I was paid to do a podcast for a web site about how to start a cleaning business. It was surprising how quickly it caught on. The traffic to another of my blogs, my personal blog, gets about 6 hits a day from that other site. It may not seem like much, but he gets 200 hits, and 6 of them click through to my site. It just shows the level of interest.

Here in Seattle I know just about every company, and a lot of the independents. I’ll stop the car when I see a person loading a vacuum into a car, and hand them my card. It’s good to know who is in the business, and some of those people have referred me clients.

Probably the biggest set of new clients we get are from people who lost their house cleaner. The cleaner leaves the business, or goes on vacation, and never comes back. There may be a strong bond, but it is a hard business.

The point I’m making is that the cleaning business is always having turn overs. That’s why, I think, people like big companies. They know that the house will always be cleaned with less of the drama, confusion, or misunderstandings that some independents have. There are some great independents, that are twice as competent as we are. They can unfortunately never be duplicated. They have a small market. For the rest of us, we all strive to be your best choice.

A women made a comment to me yesterday that having us clean her house helped her self esteem. It reminded me of this article http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-384041/Cleaning-new-therapy.html

We do feel better when the house is clean. It’s more than just getting a task done, and out of the way. We are programmed since childhood to clean our rooms, wash our hands, keep your desk tidy, and to put things back where we found them. It’s deep seated stuff, that is now getting more media attention.

The therapy works both ways. As a house cleaning professional I can attest to the fact I also feel a sense of pride, and accomplishment., when a house is cleaned. I feel good leaving a place looking, and smelling clean. People tell us they have a sense of joy when they come home to a clean house. People are happy to see us.

Cleaning is an uplifting experience that has very few down sides. Most of the time we only haggle about price. The desire to have a clean house is already there. The price for that sense of joy is the thing people are careful about, as they should be.

Each year I post some articles about killing mildew because here in Seattle black powder mildew is an eye sore. It grows in the house, and outside. It discolors decks, siding, sidewalks, and patios. You see it on roofs, but notice moss more. I’ve made kind of a science of killing mildew.

There are chemicals; bleach being the most commonly used. There are also natural remedies, such as vinegar, borax, and hydrogen peroxide. Simple citrus detergents can also clean mildew, but are not as effective in killing the spores.

When you use vinegar, or hydrogen peroxide you would use them full strength, the peroxide being a 3% solution. With borax you would mix it with a very little detergent as a wetting agent. In all cases it takes about 30 minutes to an hour to work.

What I have tried effectively is to make up solutions like mixing vinegar, and bleach with some citrus cleaner. I use a gallon of vinegar, a gallon of bleach, and mix it in a 20 gallon sprayer pump. There are also 5 gallon back pack sprayers, or 1 gallon garden sprayer. It’s important to keep the ratios at about 10% to 20%.

The other caution is to spray, let the solution work, and maybe spray the solution on again. Watch to see that the mildew fades away completely before you rinse, pressure wash, or clean the surfaces. Killing the mildew is the most important part of the operation.

Some people have a gift for keeping a place tidy. We all know some one who has the gift. It looks so easy. Some people effortlessly glide through life in perfect harmony.

The reality is that some people are born with an ability to see spaces the way they can be then fashion the space accordingly. If that person is a designer, decorator, or architect we think it’s normal that some one would have a talent. If the person is a professional organizer, then we begrudgingly give that person latitude. A house cleaner however is a step below janitorial services.

No better example exists than two brothers who I went high school with. One is a musician, the other a house cleaner. The musician has a talent, as does the house cleaner. You can just tell by the way he keeps his cars, perfectly. His home is immaculate, and designed beautifully, but frugally. I mentioned the part about him being frugal because he is also somewhat of a financial wizard. He has worked part time his entire adult life, saved his money, paid off his house, and has a hefty retirement account. He has a gift.

I’m going to write more about this because I have hundreds of stories about house cleaners. This is one of those topics we don’t really think about.

I have been preparing properties for sale since 1972. Our company has prepared thousands of properties for sale for a wide variety of Real Estate agents. We have work in multi million dollar homes, and condos filled from floor to ceiling. One common idea is that anything will sell if it’s clean enough.

Over the years we have done everything. We have taken several properties down to the studs, and rebuilt. We’ve done additions, remodels, landscaping, yard work, painting, and tile. We have painted hundreds of doors red, and built white picket fences. We have performed all the tricks of the trade to create desire, and calm fears.

If you read through this blog you’ll find there are right ways to get a property in top dollar condition. We defer a lot to Real Estate agents, but many home owners have taken a long view to getting a property ready for the market. Many people who hire us as a regularly scheduled cleaning resource eventually put the property up for sale. It’s easier to do little tasks while you live in a property so you can enjoy the improvements. It’s also smart to keep a property maintained. Properties show better if they look, and feel like the seller cared about pride of ownership.

In the next few months I’ll continue to post some ideas about properties for sale.

Let me jump right in with having stuff isn’t always a bad thing. There are collectors that we call eccentric. It depends on the stuff, right? If you are walking through pathways of antiques, paintings, and silver that’s eccentric, and that’s the story I’m telling today.

We see a lot of cluttered houses. One widow who was moved to assisted living had a house full of junk, as the daughter described it. Well, as it turned out that junk added up to over a million dollars. The woman had dementia, and a shopping disorder, but she had a good eye for value.

She worked in an antique store, helping. The daughter complained that the owner had taken advantage of her mother by selling her all this junk. It was a lot, but as we were looking I saw a painting in the corner that I recognized as a Kenneth Callahan. It was unusual.

Her closet was filled with furs, but not just any furs, they were from a period when you got high quality. There were bowls filled with costume jewelry, but they were actual stones. It wasn’t glass costume, and it was intricate 1920s, to 1950s designs.

What she really had a lot of was glassware, and silver. She had silver stuffed under the bed, all through the living room, and dining room. The glass ware was displayed in a half dozen antique glass cabinets.

Then the daughter took me down to the basement which was a typical 1950s drinking den complete with tiki torch bar and bamboo furniture. Those rooms were stocked from floor to ceiling with every kind of kitschy memorabilia back to the 1920s which was obviously an era she enjoyed.

There wasn’t anything we could do. It all needed to be appraised, boxed up, and secured. The “stuff” was worth more than the house. It all looked like junk when it was all crammed in there, but as it was appraised it kept adding up.

We all have messes. We all have closets, or garages that need to be organized. Our house is usually in pretty good shape, organizational wise, because my wife is a genius at getting things in order. Personally, my office could use some help, but I have everything where I want it; just kidding, it is the room in our house that gets the most out of control.

This year I think we will add organizational services. It makes a huge difference in people’s lives to have everything squared a way, even if it’s only for a while. In the past couple of months we have done some whole house organizing that have had amazing results.

We feel great about providing the service because you can see the difference. The clients are happy to have a burden lifted, as on person put it. That door you never open, or space you never use, is now, once again, a part of your house. It’s an accomplishment.

We are going to try a couple of pricing models, because this is more specialized work. In many cases it’s a one or two person job. We’ll play around with it, and keep you posted.

For the past year many people who have contacted us were surprised that we were reasonable priced. We have a web site, and this blog, along with some other other advertising we do.

On Friday I was blown away by the price another company charged. It was $380 for a cleaning I bid at $135. The client had already paid the other company $380, but it was a second bid. The other bid was $400.

Now I may be wrong, but at $100 for a team of three an hour, and a half seemed like enough. That’s four, and a half person hours. The other company had four people in there all day. I understand people need work, but there was no way to get 24 hours of work out of that house.

Does that seem right to you? Does it seem like it would take 24 hours to clean a house?

I saw the house, and in the time the other company was there they missed a lot. There were cob webs, the floors were a mess, there was an accumulation of dust on the glassware, the book case, the windows, bedrooms, and laundry. So I couldn’t see really what they had done, and the client couldn’t tell me either.

This is the forth time in a month that I have heard really high prices. So, in the interest of settling out pricing, I’m proposing $100 per hour for a team of three, and $120 per hour for a team of four.

What do you think?

Last week one of our new clients commented on how quickly we got his 3000 sq ft house cleaned. Without thinking my wife replied, yes, it’s easy when you have four people on a team. He did the calculations in his head, and realized he was getting 6 man hours in an hour, and a half.

We went to this system about three years ago. Two people teams were our regular referral. What we found is that two people took much longer to get a house done than when we sent three. Three people can rotate through tasks during a day. That helps to take the tedium out of the day.

When you send in three or four people every one takes a task. One is cleaning the bathroom, the other the kitchen, and one or two to vacuum, and dust. When one person finishes they can help the others. Each house has a time limit according to what they pay. If a team goes over time it is much less of a per person set back in a day. The day flows better, smoother, and much more efficiently.

Teams make more money, because the production time is greater. They can do more in a day, they can take on more in a day. From the change from two people to three or four people to a team the increase in individual compensation rose about 20%.

You get a better job, a happier cleaning team, and a more energized experience. We have found it to be working well.

After my last post about working with hoarders I got an e-mail from a gentleman who described himself as Chronically Disorganized. If his place was a mess it was certainly masked by the highly detailed e-mail. Everything that he described in that first correspondence was absolutely correct. He described his situation perfectly. When I first met him in his hallway he was a squared away kind of guy. His apartment, however,  was a disaster.

He is a computer programmer. It was obvious how the whole thing spun out of control for him. He has an area around his desk that was some what clear, the rest of the place was piled with stuff, mail, recycling, shipping boxes, and pizza boxes. In his case there wasn’t any garbage. He had a system for that by hanging a plastic bag on the front door knob. The accumulation was about five years worth.

My wife says that she saves me from being just like this guy. I am Chronically Disorganized. She keeps me on the straight, and narrow. I spend a lot of time here, at the computer, or go out into the field. By working constantly it sets the priorities. That sounds like an excuse, and it probably is, but some things just don’t bother me. I think that’s why we relate with those who ask for help getting cleaned out, and organized.