We clean offices from the top down

Each office visit follows the same order

An office clean goes wrong when it starts at the floor. We begin with the trash, since carrying a full bag through a clean room drops crumbs on it. Then the dusting runs from the top down: shelf tops, monitor backs, window sills and the edges of cubicle walls. Desks come after that. Anything a hand touches all day, like door handles and light switches, gets its own pass with a fresh cloth. Floors are always last, so whatever fell during the work gets picked up with them.

You can tell a desk was cleaned right by what is still on it. Papers stay where they were left, and nobody hunts for a sticky note on Monday morning. We clean the open surface and wipe around what people leave out. Keyboards and phones get a light wipe with a damp cloth, never a wet one, because liquid in a keyboard ruins it. At the end, run a finger along a sill or a shelf edge. It should come back clean.

Skip the high dusting and it shows within a week. Dust drifts off the shelves onto desks that were just wiped, and people notice it first on dark desktops and screens. Skip the touch points and the office looks clean while the restroom door handle still carries whatever it picked up yesterday. Those two steps are the first ones a rushed clean drops. They take time and nobody sees them get done, and they are the two we never drop.

• Desks and shared surfaces wiped down
• Break room sink and counters cleaned
• Restroom fixtures and mirrors scrubbed
• Trash emptied from every room
• Floors vacuumed or mopped last

Hard water leaves spots on office fixtures

Much of the tap water around Los Angeles is hard, which means it carries dissolved minerals. When that water dries on a faucet or a mirror, it leaves white spots and a chalky crust. In an office restroom used all day, the crust builds fast. It shows up first around the faucet base and at the waterline in the toilet bowl. A general spray cleaner lifts the dirt and leaves the mineral right where it was.

So restrooms get their own order. Toilets and urinals get cleaner first, and it sits while we work on the sinks and mirrors. Faucets and sink basins get a cleaner made for mineral scale, then a rinse, then a dry wipe. That last step matters more than it sounds, since water left to air dry lays down a fresh set of spots by the next morning. The floor goes last, from the far corner back to the door.

Break rooms collect a different kind of mess. Food spatters the inside roof of the microwave, where nobody looks until it starts to smell. The sink gets coffee rings on top of the same mineral scale as the restroom. Handles on the fridge and the coffee maker get touched more than anything else in the office. We wipe out the microwave, clean the counters and the sink, wipe every handle, and mop where drinks spilled and dried under the table.

Santa Ana winds push dust indoors

Southern California stays dry most of the year, and dry ground gives up fine dust every time the wind picks up. When the Santa Ana winds blow in fall and winter, they drive that dust through every gap in a building. It gets in under doors and around older window frames, and the air vents spread it from room to room. An office that looked fine on Friday can have a gray film on every desk by Monday after a windy weekend.

The building makes a difference. Plenty of offices around Los Angeles sit in low stucco buildings from the middle of the last century. Many still have their original windows, and those rarely seal tight anymore. Others are in tilt-up concrete buildings near the freeways, where truck traffic adds a black soot to the dust. Storefront offices on the big boulevards get the most, since the glass front faces the street. In all of them, the window sills and vent covers need a wipe on every visit.

Fire season adds ash to the mix. When a fire burns anywhere upwind, fine ash settles on cars and sidewalks and gets tracked or blown inside. Ash is gritty and a little oily, and a dry duster just smears it into gray streaks. It has to come up with a damp cloth that gets rinsed often. Floors need a vacuum with a good filter before any mopping, or the mop turns the ash into paste.

Most floor dirt comes in on shoes

Shoes carry in most of the dirt on an office floor. Around Los Angeles that means dry grit from the sidewalk and the parking lot most of the year. On the few days it rains, it means mud. Grit works like sandpaper on a hard floor and grinds down into carpet near the door. The first few steps inside the entry get more of our time than anywhere else, because that is where the wear starts.

Offices around here sit on very different floors. Newer suites tend to have carpet tile, and converted warehouse space often has sealed concrete. Some older houses in Pasadena and Glendale now hold small offices and still have wood floors. Carpet gets vacuumed slowly, in overlapping passes, so the grit actually comes up. Hard floors get vacuumed or swept first and then mopped with a cleaner that suits the surface. A wet mop on a gritty floor only scratches it.

A rushed floor job shows before anyone complains. Carpet by the door turns a shade darker in a path. Hard floors lose their shine in a trail from the entry to the break room. Mopping without vacuuming first leaves a streaky film once it dries. That is why floors are the last job on every visit, and the one we look over on the way out.

Small shops need clean glass and counters

Small businesses and boutique stores are workplaces too, and customers judge them on how they look. The glass door and the display cases pick up fingerprints all day. Near the coast in Santa Monica, the marine layer leaves a damp film on storefront glass on many mornings, and street dust sticks to it. Glass gets washed and then dried with a clean cloth, both sides of the door, so it does not streak in the afternoon sun.

We also do sanitation cleaning for small businesses and boutique stores. That work is about the surfaces many hands touch in a short time. In a shop that means the card reader, the counter edge, the door push, fitting room hooks and the restroom door handle. Those get a disinfecting cleaner, and then the step most people skip: leaving it wet long enough to work before it is wiped off. Wiped off right away, it cleans the surface but does not disinfect it.

A shop floor has the same grit problem as an office, with more feet crossing it. Display tables and clothing racks collect dust along their top edges and around the base, where a vacuum head does not reach. We dust those before touching the floor. Then we do the floor from the back of the store toward the door, so nobody crosses a wet floor to leave. Leave a rack base alone for a month and a gray line shows right under the merchandise.