Preparing for a cleaning visit is less about the state of your house than most people assume, and more about the things a team cannot work out for themselves.
Twenty minutes split between clearing surfaces and passing on a few pieces of information is the difference between a visit that goes the way you imagined and one that goes almost right.
The physical preparation
Clearing is not cleaning. You are not tidying so the cleaners think well of you; you are removing obstacles so more of the visit goes into surfaces.
- 01Clear kitchen and bathroom counters into a basket or drawer — the single biggest gain
- 02Pick up floors: toys, shoes, laundry, bags, pet bowls
- 03Clear the dining table and any surface that has become a drop zone
- 04Put away anything valuable, fragile, irreplaceable or genuinely private
- 05If you want linens changed, leave fresh ones visible on the bed
- 06Leave out any product you want used on a specific surface, with a note
Access, settled in advance
Access failures are the most common reason a visit does not happen, and they are entirely preventable.
Confirm how the team gets in — key, lockbox, smart lock code, or someone home. For gated communities and apartment buildings, that means gate codes, fobs, callbox instructions and where a vehicle can park. If there is an alarm, they need the code and the instructions for it, including what happens if it goes off and who the monitoring company calls first.
Give these details once, in writing, and ask for them to be confirmed back to you. An arrangement that exists only in a phone call is an assumption.
The information that actually matters
This is the part people skip, and it determines more of the outcome than anything on the clearing list.
- Surfaces needing specific handling — natural stone, unsealed wood, a delicate finish
- Any floor that must not be wet-mopped
- Rooms you would rather were not entered at all
- Anything broken or already damaged, so it is not attributed to the visit
- Allergies or sensitivities in the household, and any product to avoid
- What matters most to you — if the bathrooms are the thing you care about, say so
Pets
Pets are normal and rarely a problem. Surprises are the problem.
Say what animals are in the home and how they usually react to visitors and to equipment — vacuums in particular. If an animal is nervous, anxious around strangers, or likely to bolt through an open door, the simplest arrangement is to shut them in one room with a note on the door.
Also mention where litter trays or feeding areas are, and whether you want those areas cleaned as part of the visit.
The first visit specifically
A first visit benefits from a little more preparation than the ones after it.
If you can be home for the start, a five-minute walk-through is worth more than any written note. Point out the surfaces that need care, the room to skip, where the dog goes, and the thing that bothers you most about the house.
Ask for those points to go into your job notes so they persist. On a well-run recurring plan you should never have to say the same thing twice.
What not to bother doing
Three pre-visit habits are pure wasted effort.
Do not pre-clean surfaces that are about to be cleaned properly. Do not vacuum beforehand. Do not scrub the shower before someone arrives to scrub the shower.
And do not apologize for your home. Cleaners see houses at every point on the spectrum, and a lived-in home is the normal case rather than the exception.
Afterwards
Two habits make the arrangement better over time.
Walk the home after the visit, from the doorway of each room. That is the perspective the work was finished to, and it is the moment to raise anything.
And if something was not right, say so promptly and specifically. "The shower glass still looks cloudy" is actionable; "it was not great" is not. A company with a defined guarantee window will want to hear from you inside it, because putting something right two days later costs them an hour and putting it right two weeks later costs them the relationship.
