We clean each room top to bottom

Every visit covers the rooms you use

A recurring clean follows the same order in every room, and the order matters. We start high and work down, so dust knocked off a shelf or a ceiling fan lands on a surface we have not wiped yet. Dry work comes before wet work. A damp cloth drags loose dust into gray streaks. Floors come last, from the back of the house to the front door, so nobody walks across a clean floor on the way out.

The kitchen and the bathrooms take most of the time on a regular visit, because that is where a house gets dirty fastest. In the kitchen we clean the counters and the sink, then the stovetop and the fronts of the appliances. Cabinet doors get wiped too. Hands grab them all day. In the bathrooms we scrub the toilet inside and out and clean the tub or shower. The mirror and the faucets get wiped dry last, so they do not spot.

Bedrooms and living rooms are mostly dust and floors. We dust the furniture, the shelves, the window sills and the fan blades we can reach, then vacuum the carpet and mop the hard floors. Trash comes out of every room and a fresh liner goes in. You can tell a good visit by touch. A finger run along a nightstand comes away clean, and the kitchen counter feels smooth under your hand instead of sticky.

• Kitchen counters, sink, stovetop and appliance fronts
• Toilets, tubs, showers, sinks and mirrors cleaned
• Furniture, shelves and window sills dusted
• Carpets vacuumed and hard floors mopped
• Trash emptied in every room

Desert dust settles in every Gilbert house

The dust in a Gilbert house is finer than most people expect. It blows in off open desert and empty lots. It gets inside through door gaps, window tracks and dog doors, and on the bottoms of shoes. In summer, monsoon storms push big clouds of it across the Valley, and a house with every window shut still picks up a film. The air is dry. So the dust stays light, and a lot of it drifts back down after you wipe.

Air conditioning runs most of the year here, and every return vent pulls that dust through the house. It collects on the vent grilles and on the ceiling fan blades that spin all summer. Many Gilbert homes are two-story stucco houses with high ceilings and plant shelves over the entry or the stairs. Those ledges gather a gray layer. You cannot see it from the floor, but the fan blows it back down onto the furniture below.

That is the reason to clean on a schedule in this part of Arizona. Dust that has sat for a week comes off with one pass of a dry cloth. Dust left for a month is different. In the kitchen it mixes with cooking grease. In the bathroom it mixes with steam, and it turns into a film that has to be scrubbed off. Skip a few visits and each clean takes longer, until the house needs a deep clean to get back to where it was.

Hard water leaves white spots on fixtures

Tap water around Gilbert is hard, which means it carries a lot of dissolved minerals. When a drop dries on a faucet or a glass shower door, the water goes and the minerals stay. That leaves a white spot. In dry heat it happens fast, so a shower used in the morning can show spots on the glass and the handles by the afternoon. Left alone, those spots build on each other and turn into crusty scale.

On a regular visit we take care of spots before they build up. We spray the glass and the fixtures, give the cleaner a minute to loosen the minerals, then wipe them off. The step most people skip is drying. Rinse water left on glass and chrome dries into fresh spots, so we dry both by hand with a clean cloth before moving on.

The common mistake is using the wrong cleaner on the wrong surface. Acid cuts hard water scale on glass. It also eats into natural stone. Plenty of homes in Scottsdale and Paradise Valley have travertine or marble on the counters and the shower walls. An acid cleaner leaves dull patches on that stone, and no amount of wiping will fix them. So we check what each surface is made of before anything gets sprayed on it.

We vacuum tile floors before we mop

Most houses around Gilbert are stucco over a wood frame, built on a concrete slab. Inside, that usually means tile across the ground floor and carpet in the bedrooms. Tile hides dirt well. Run a bare foot across it, though, and you feel the grit sitting in the grout lines. Mop that floor first and the water turns the grit into mud, and the mud settles into the grout and darkens it over time.

So tile gets vacuumed first, including the edges along the baseboards and the corners behind doors where dust piles up. Then we mop with clean water and a small amount of cleaner, and we change the water when it goes cloudy. Less soap is better. Too much leaves a sticky film, and in a house this dusty a sticky floor picks up dirt again within days. A good floor shows no streaks when the sun comes through the sliding glass door.

Carpet in the bedrooms has a different problem. Sand from the yard and the pool deck gets carried in on feet and paws, and it works down into the fibers. Each step grinds it against them. That is how a worn path shows up between the doorway and the bed. Regular vacuuming pulls the sand out first. We go slowly where people walk most and at the bottom of the stairs, where it collects.