A city of old houses, cleaned like it
Schenectady's housing is older than most of the Capital Region's, and that changes how a house should be cleaned. Many homes here still have original hardwood, plaster walls, cast iron radiators, deep window sills and staircases with spindles that hold dust in every gap. We plan for that from the first visit.
Radiators get wiped down properly, not just the parts you can see from the couch. Old wood floors get a damp mop that is actually damp, never soaked, because century-old boards and finishes don't want standing water. Painted trim gets hand-wiped, since a duster just pushes grit into the corners and old woodwork shows every streak.
Not every house in Schenectady is a museum piece, of course. Plenty of people live in two-family homes, postwar capes, or a newer apartment down at Mohawk Harbor near Rivers Casino. The approach is the same: we clean the house you actually have, not a checklist written for a generic suburban box.
Neighborhoods we know well
The Stockade
The city's oldest neighborhood packs colonial-era and 1800s houses onto narrow streets by the Mohawk. Rooms tend to be small, staircases steep, and ceilings uneven. We carry supplies up once and work from the top floor down so dust only falls onto spots we haven't reached yet.
Old windows are the other Stockade quirk. Wavy glass, painted-over sashes and deep sills catch grit from the street, and they're worth a careful hand. We wipe sills and frames on every visit and save the glass itself for a deep clean or an add-on, so a regular visit doesn't turn into a window day.
The GE Realty Plot
The large early 1900s homes near Union College, many built for General Electric managers and engineers, have a lot of rooms and a lot of woodwork. For houses this size, a recurring clean of the main living floors plus a rotating extra each visit (one bedroom floor, the sunroom, the third floor) usually works better than trying to do every room every time.
Mont Pleasant, Upper Union Street and beyond
Mont Pleasant's blocks of single-family and two-family homes, the side streets off the shops and restaurants of Upper Union Street, and the streets around Central Park all get the same attention. If you own a two-family and live in one unit, we can clean your side on a schedule and the other side between tenants.
Mohawk Harbor and the newer buildings
The apartments and condos at Mohawk Harbor are the opposite of the Stockade: open layouts, big windows, stainless appliances and glass showers. They're quicker to clean, but they show everything. Fingerprints on stainless, water spots on glass and streaks on wide-plank vinyl are the whole game here, and we use the right product on each instead of one all-purpose spray.
What a regular visit covers
A standard house cleaning covers the rooms you live in: kitchen counters, stovetop, sink and appliance fronts; bathrooms top to bottom; dusting reachable surfaces including radiators, sills and baseboards; vacuuming and mopping every floor; plus making beds and taking out trash. Inside the oven, inside the fridge and interior windows are add-ons or part of a deep clean.
That's the baseline for our house cleaning services. If the house hasn't had a thorough clean in a while, start with a deep clean so the regular visits after it are maintaining a clean house instead of chipping away at a backlog. Then most Schenectady households settle into recurring house cleaning every week or every other week.
How the year shapes the work
Winter is hard on Schenectady floors. Road salt and slush come in on every boot, and the white film it leaves on hardwood and entry tile needs more than a dry sweep. We pay extra attention to entries and mudrooms from December through March.
Spring is when people book the bigger jobs: windows, baseboards, the stuff behind the fridge, the radiator covers that haven't moved since fall. When the Rose Garden in Central Park is blooming, it's usually a good time to finally open the windows and get the winter dust out.
Then there are the one-off reasons. Family coming in for a show at Proctors, a Union College graduation weekend, a holiday dinner you're hosting for the first time in the new place. A one-time clean the day before takes one thing off the list.
Getting a quote
Tell us your neighborhood, roughly how many bedrooms and bathrooms, whether there are pets, and what you want done. A Stockade rowhouse and a Realty Plot colonial are very different jobs, so the details matter. You can fill out the free house cleaning quote form or call (518) 464-8817.
We also clean across the river and up the road: see our pages for house cleaning in Glenville and Scotia and house cleaning in Niskayuna.