We keep Sun Valley homes clean

Sun Valley wind pushes dust indoors

Sun Valley lies between bare sagebrush hills north of Reno and Sparks, and wind moves through it on many afternoons. There is not much lawn out here to hold the ground down. Plenty of yards are gravel or packed dirt, and some side streets have no curb or sidewalk. When the wind picks up, fine dust rides in under the doors and through the window tracks, even with everything shut.

That dust does not stay on the floor. It settles on ceiling fan blades and along the tops of door frames, places nobody looks at from the couch. It also packs into the grooves of sliding glass doors until the door starts to drag. Wipe it with a wet rag and you get muddy streaks. Leave it a few months in the kitchen and it mixes with cooking grease on the range hood. Then it becomes a sticky film that a dry duster only smears around.

A house like that gets cleaned from the top down. We dust the fan blades and the tops of door frames first. Then we vacuum the window and slider tracks before anything gets wet, so the dust comes out dry instead of turning to mud. Furniture gets moved so the dust behind it goes too. One customer wrote on Google: "They don’t dust around things, they actually move them!" In a Sun Valley house, that is where a lot of the dust ends up.

• Fan blades and door frame tops dusted first
• Window and slider tracks vacuumed out dry
• Furniture moved to reach the dust behind it
• Baseboards wiped in every room
• Greasy dust cleaned off the range hood

Sun Valley manufactured homes need gentler cleaning

Many houses in Sun Valley are manufactured homes, with site-built single-story houses mixed in along the same streets. Each kind needs different care. A manufactured home often has vinyl-covered wall panels with thin trim strips over the seams. The tubs and shower surrounds are usually fiberglass or acrylic, not tile. The kitchen cabinets are often laminate, too. Those surfaces look tough, and they scratch more easily than people expect.

The common mistake is scrubbing a fiberglass tub with scouring powder or a green scrub pad. It takes the soap ring off, and it takes the shine off too. The fine scratches it leaves pick up dirt faster after that. Vinyl wall panels have their own problem. Soak them and water runs in behind the trim strips at the seams. Scrub too hard and the printed pattern on the panel starts to wear through in spots.

In a manufactured home we use soft cloths and non-scratch pads, and we wipe the wall panels damp instead of wet. Laminate cabinet doors get the same care, since the edges can swell if water sits on them. The site-built houses on the same streets need different work. They tend to have painted wood trim and window casings, and the dust sits thick on top of them. That means more wiping by hand along every ledge.

Empty Sun Valley houses show every missed spot

When a Sun Valley house empties out, the dirt the furniture was hiding comes into view. Maybe a tenant is leaving, or the owner is getting the place ready to sell. Either way, there is a gray line of dust along the walls where the couch and the beds sat. The carpet shows worn paths from the front door to the kitchen. With gravel and dirt outside, grit gets ground into the entry floor over the years.

Landlords and buyers check the same places. They open the oven and the fridge, and they run a finger along the window sills. In a house that has sat through a windy season, the blinds and the window tracks are usually the worst of it. A move-out clean that skips them can cost a tenant part of a deposit. On a house for sale, it gives a buyer something to point at during the walk-through.

We clean rental properties between tenants, and we clean houses before they go up for sale. The empty rooms get worked top to bottom, and the floors come last so nothing falls on a clean floor. If the garage or the closets need sorting before the move, we also do decluttering and garage and closet organization. A recent Google review says "the owner of the company was on-site working with her crew."

Getting a price in Sun Valley

Call (775) 285-6899 and tell us about your Sun Valley house and what you want done. You can also ask for an estimate online from this page. Either way, you get a free quote before any work starts, so you know what the job covers and what it costs.