How to Prepare Your Home Before the Cleaners Arrive

Almost every new client asks some version of the same nervous question: should I clean before you get here? No. But there is a difference between cleaning and clearing, and ten minutes of clearing genuinely changes what you get, because a flat-rate visit buys a fixed amount of skilled time and you decide how much of it goes to surfaces instead of to sorting your mail.

The ten-minute version

• Clear kitchen counters of mail, homework, chargers and grocery bags
• Clear bathroom counters into a drawer or a basket
• Pick up floors — toys, shoes, laundry, dog bowls, cords
• Load or empty the dishwasher so the sink is available
• Strip beds if you want fresh linens and leave the clean set on the bed
• Put away anything valuable, fragile or sentimental you would rather nobody touch

Why clearing matters more than scrubbing

A cleaner can disinfect a counter in twenty seconds and can spend four minutes deciding where your kids' paperwork belongs. Multiply that across a kitchen island, three bathroom vanities and a dining table and you have lost half an hour of actual cleaning to guesswork. Worse, we will not throw anything away or file your papers, so cluttered surfaces get cleaned around rather than cleaned — and that is the single most common reason someone feels a visit was not thorough.

Tell us your priorities in one sentence

Every home has one room that decides whether the visit felt worth it. For some clients it is the primary bathroom; for others it is the kitchen floor or the guest room before family arrives. Text us that one thing before the visit and we will weight the time toward it. Silence gets you an even clean, which is fine but rarely what you actually wanted.

Pets

We like dogs and dogs like vacuums considerably less than they think they do. Anxious or reactive animals should be crated or in a closed room with a note on the door, both for their sake and so doors can be left open while floors dry. Let us know in advance if a pet is not to be let outside — most of our missed-detail reports involve a cat and an open patio door.

Access, which is where visits actually fail

• Send the gate code, garage code or lockbox code the day before, not the morning of
• In Parker, Denver, Aurora and nearby HOA neighborhoods, tell us where parking is allowed so we are not circling
• If there is an alarm, give us the disarm sequence or disarm it remotely
• Confirm whether a door will be unlocked or someone will be home

Water, power and space

We bring our own supplies, vacuum and cloths, but we need working hot water and a couple of accessible outlets. If you are mid-renovation, mid-move or the water is off for plumbing work, tell us before the day — a house without hot water cannot be cleaned to standard and we would rather move the visit than do a half job.

What you do not need to do

• Do not pre-clean bathrooms or the kitchen. That is literally what you are paying for.
• Do not buy supplies. If you want a specific product used on stone, hardwood or a septic system, just leave it out with a note.
• Do not stay home and supervise. Most of our clients are at work; you will get a text when we start and when we finish.
• Do not tidy at midnight the night before. Ten minutes in the morning is plenty.

After the visit

Walk the house while it is still fresh and tell us anything you would like done differently — not as a complaint, as calibration. Preferences about which products touch which floors, how you like towels folded, whether the basement matters, all of it goes in your file so the second visit is closer to right and the fifth is exactly right. If something was genuinely missed, we come back and fix it free within 48 hours.

New clients usually start with a deep clean to get the home to baseline, then move to a recurring standard clean every two weeks. See what a deep clean covers, check the flat rate for your home size on the pricing page, or read about how we work in your city.