Post-Construction Cleaning in Seattle

Household dust falls and stays down. Construction dust doesn’t. Cutting, sanding and drilling throw particles fine enough to hang in the air for hours and to keep drifting down for days after the last tool goes quiet. Clean a room on the afternoon the trades leave and you’ll find it dusty again the next morning — not because the clean was bad, but because the air wasn’t finished.

Everything that makes this job different follows from that one fact.

How the work is actually sequenced

It runs top to bottom, and it runs more than once. High surfaces first — light fixtures, the tops of doors and frames, window reveals — then walls and baseboards, then the floor last, because everything above it sheds onto it.

Then a gap, then a second pass. The gap is the part people try to skip and it’s the part that decides the result: what’s still airborne has to land before it can be picked up. Booking the whole thing for a single afternoon is the most common way this job goes wrong.

Residue isn’t dust and doesn’t come off like dust

Running alongside the dust is a second problem entirely: what trades leave bonded to surfaces. Paint flecks, adhesive, smeared caulk, drywall compound splatter, protective film with its glue still attached, and the pale film cement leaves across tile.

None of those release the same way, and guessing costs you either a wasted pass or a ruined finish. Cement haze wants acid. Greasy residue wants alkali. Applied the wrong way round on a kitchen installed last week, that’s an expensive afternoon — and new materials are the worst possible place to learn the difference.

So the decision gets made material by material, in front of the surface itself, and anything we’re unsure of gets tried first somewhere nobody will ever look.

Vacuuming before wiping, always

A damp cloth on a dusty surface makes mud, and mud has to be removed twice. Fine debris comes off dry first — vacuumed, not brushed, because brushing puts it straight back in the air you’re waiting to settle. Only then does anything get wet.

It’s a small ordering rule and it’s most of the difference between a site that finishes clean and one that keeps looking hazy no matter how many cloths get used.

What we need from the site

This is the one job where what happens before we arrive matters as much as what we do.

• The trades have to be finished. Not nearly finished. One more afternoon of cutting undoes a full clean.
• Debris and scrap need to be gone. Removing building waste isn’t something we do — it needs a dumpster or the contractor.
• Power and running water on site. Without both, most of this work can’t happen.
• Protective film should stay on until we get there where you can leave it — it’s easier to lift film than to clean what it was protecting.

Quoting a site we haven’t seen

Floor area tells you very little here. What decides the hours is how much was done, what it was done to, and how long the place has stood open. A single refitted bathroom can take longer than a whole apartment that only had walls painted.

So this one is quoted after somebody has looked, more firmly than any other service we offer. You get the number and the number of passes before anything starts, and nothing starts until you’ve agreed to both.

What stays out of scope

Three worth naming here specifically. Building waste and scrap aren’t ours to take. Height is a different trade — high-level work on an open site needs equipment we don’t carry. And we don’t repair what the work damaged; glass that has been scratched or spotted with paint may need a glass company rather than a cleaner, and we’ll tell you when we see it.

The standing limits that apply to every job we do are set out further down.