We clean offices from the top down

Office cleaning follows a set order

An office clean goes in a set order, and the order matters. We empty the trash and recycling first, so we are not carrying bags across work we already finished. Then we dust up high: the tops of cubicle walls, shelves, window sills and the air vents. Desks and counters come next, then the break room and the restrooms. Floors are always last, because all the work above them knocks dust and crumbs down.

When an office is cleaned right, the people who work there notice the small things first. Every trash can has a fresh liner. There are no crumbs under the desks or along the edges of the carpet. We wipe desks that are clear and leave papers where they sit, so nobody comes in to find their notes moved. The soap and paper in the restroom are full before anyone needs them.

Most bad office cleaning comes from doing the right steps in the wrong order. Wipe the desks after you vacuum, and the crumbs you brush off land on a clean carpet. Use one cloth in the restroom and then the break room, and you carry the restroom into the kitchen. We keep separate cloths for restrooms and food areas. Door handles and light switches get missed all the time, and those are the spots everyone in the office touches.

• Trash emptied and liners replaced
• Vents and high ledges dusted first
• Clear desks wiped, papers left in place
• Restrooms cleaned with their own cloths
• Floors vacuumed and mopped last

Office restrooms take the most time

A shared restroom gets used by everyone in the office, so we give it more time than any other room. We start by spraying disinfectant on the toilets and sinks, then leave it wet while we refill the paper and soap. That wait matters. Wiped off right away, disinfectant cleans the surface but does not have time to kill germs. After that we clean the mirrors and the stall walls, then the toilets inside and out, and the floor last.

Water around Gilbert is hard, and you can see it in any office restroom. It leaves a white crust around the faucet bases and a ring inside the toilet bowl. On the mirror it shows up as spots that come back after a normal wipe. Regular cleaner does not remove mineral scale. It needs a scale remover left on long enough to soften it, and then a scrub. Leave the crust alone and grime builds on top of it.

Most of the smell in an office restroom comes from the floor around the base of the toilet and the wall behind it. Splashes dry there and soak into the grout. A quick clean skips that spot because it is awkward to reach, so the room smells stale even when the bowl is spotless. We get down and scrub it by hand. The restroom also gets its own mop head, so what is on that floor stays off the office floors.

Desert dust gets into every office

Dust is a constant problem in Gilbert offices. Many of them are in single-story stucco buildings. Others are in tilt-up concrete business parks, the kind with big flat walls and roll-up doors. Either way, the front door usually faces a parking lot, and fine desert dust blows in each time someone walks through. In summer, monsoon dust storms push it under doors and around window frames. By morning it sits on every flat surface in a thin tan layer.

The air conditioning runs most of the year here, and it moves that dust all through the building. The big vents that pull air in catch it first. The vents that blow cold air out turn gray around the edges. Dry air adds static, so dust clings to computer monitors and the plastic arms of office chairs. We dust the vents and high ledges before we touch a desk. If they get skipped, the next time the air conditioning turns on, it blows dust onto clean desks.

A lot of offices around here have gravel and crushed granite out front instead of grass. Small bits of it get carried in on shoes and collect at the front door and down the hallways. On tile or sealed concrete, that grit works like sandpaper under every step. So we vacuum or dry mop the hard floors before any water touches them. Mop first and the dust turns to mud that settles into the grout lines on tile and dries there.

We clean the rooms everyone shares

An office break room gets used like a kitchen by people who all assume someone else will wipe up. So we clean it like a kitchen. We wipe out the microwave, where soup splatter dries hard on the top and the turntable. The fridge handle gets cleaned, since everyone in the office grabs it. So do the coffee maker and the counter around it, where drips and spilled sugar get sticky. The table gets wiped last, before the floor.

Plenty of offices here let the building warm up at night and over the weekend to save on cooling. That makes sense, but it is hard on a break room. Lunch scraps in the kitchen trash sit in a warm room for two days, and anything that leaked under the bag starts to smell. We empty the kitchen trash each time we clean. We also wipe out the inside of the can, where that leaked liquid dries into a sticky layer.

The lobby and the conference room are what your clients see. Glass entry doors pick up handprints right where people push, and strong afternoon sun on west-facing glass shows every smear. We clean glass with a wet pass and then a dry one. Skip the dry pass and the door looks fine at night, then streaky once the sun hits it. The conference table gets wiped edge to edge, and the chairs get pushed back in.