Rowhouses take a different kind of clean
Downtown Troy is full of 19th-century brownstones and brick rowhouses, and they are not cleaned like a suburban ranch. They are tall and narrow, often three floors or more, with long staircases, high ceilings, big windows, decorative mantels and a lot of original wood. Most of the work is vertical.
So we work top floor down. Ceiling corners and the tops of door frames get done with extension tools, because cobwebs in a room with high ceilings are easy to miss from the ground and impossible to unsee once you notice them. Stairs get vacuumed tread by tread, including runners, and the spindles get wiped by hand. Wood floors get a careful damp mop that won't hurt old finishes.
Kitchens in converted rowhouses are often small and bathrooms tucked into odd corners. That's fine. Small rooms just need a cleaner who doesn't rush the corners.
Then there's the street itself. Downtown houses sit right on the sidewalk, so city grit blows in every time the front door opens and settles on the first floor faster than the floors above it. In winter the salt from the sidewalks ends up on the hall runner and the bottom stairs. We give entries and front rooms a little extra time on every visit, since that's where a Troy house gets dirty first.
Every part of Troy, hill included
We clean homes across the city: downtown and the Washington Park blocks, the streets around Russell Sage College, the student neighborhoods up the hill near RPI, Lansingburgh in North Troy, Sycaway on the east side, and South Troy down by the river. If you're just over the line in Brunswick or North Greenbush, include your address with the quote request and we'll confirm.
Each part of town brings its own kind of house. Washington Park and the downtown brownstones are the showpieces, with the woodwork to match. Lansingburgh has a lot of older wood-frame houses and two-families, where an owner often lives in one unit and rents the other. Sycaway's quieter streets lean toward single-family homes with yards, and South Troy has modest older houses close to the river. We adjust to the house, not the other way around.
Student rentals and the spring scramble
Between RPI, Russell Sage and Hudson Valley Community College, Troy has a lot of student housing, and almost all of it turns over at once at the end of the academic year. Landlords need units ready to show. Tenants want their deposit back. Parents driving in from out of state want the apartment handed back clean so they can load the car and leave.
Our move-out cleaning is built for that: inside the fridge and oven, inside cabinets and drawers, bathrooms scrubbed down, baseboards, and every floor. If you manage several units in the same building, tell us up front. Doing them together is easier for everyone than scheduling them one at a time.
Keeping a Troy house clean week to week
Most of our Troy clients don't need anything dramatic. They need the house kept up so their Saturday can go to the Troy Waterfront Farmers Market or brunch on River Street instead of scrubbing the tub. That's what recurring house cleaning is for: the kitchen, bathrooms, dusting, floors and stairs on a steady schedule.
For most households, every other week is the right rhythm. Weekly makes sense with kids, multiple pets, or a house where everyone walks in from the street straight onto the wood floors. Monthly tends to work only for one or two tidy people, and even then the bathrooms feel it by week three.
One tip for rowhouse owners: decide up front which floors are in scope. If the top floor is a guest room nobody uses, leave it off the regular visit and have it done every few visits instead. That keeps the time going to the kitchen, bathrooms and the rooms you actually live in.
When a deep clean makes more sense
Start with a deep clean if you just bought one of these old houses, if it's been months since anyone got behind the radiators, or if you're coming out of a long winter with the windows shut. A deep clean goes after the buildup that regular visits don't touch: baseboards and trim, door frames, inside the oven, light fixtures, window sills and the backs of the stairs. After that, recurring visits keep it there. And if you're in the middle of restoring one of these houses, wait until the plaster and sanding are done before booking anything. Cleaning between construction phases mostly just moves the dust around.
To get started, send us a free house cleaning quote request or call (518) 464-8817. Tell us the neighborhood, how many floors, and how many bedrooms and baths. We also clean across the river in Latham and just south in East Greenbush.