Cleaning Up In Business One House At A Time

By Nancy K. Crevier

There is a universal dream homeowners have. In it, they come home from work, open the door, and step into a clean house. The rugs are vacuumed, the shelves are dusted, the floors are mopped. In the kitchen, the counter is free of crumbs, the appliances are polished, and the stovetop shines like new. There is nary a fingerprint or gob of jam to be seen on the refrigerator door. Bathroom fixtures sparkle and the soap-scum has disappeared from the shower.

Don’t pinch yourself — there are people in Newtown who make that dream come true. For fees that start at $60 for a smaller house or $45 per hour, these heavenly helpers scrub, mop, dust, wipe-down, and brighten every room of your house.

If you have muddled along on your own over the years, the initial visit from a cleaning service is pricier. There are mopboards to wash, corners to clean, dust bunnies to shoosh, and lots of ground-in grime to get rid of that first time around. Expect to spend well over $100 to set the groundwork for future visits.

Most of us can envision being on the receiving end of a spotless house. But what is it like to be the good fairy who waves the wand and makes the dirt disappear?

First of all, the wand they wave is attached to a 15-pound-plus vacuum canister and the dirt doesn’t magically dissipate. The job is physically demanding and cleaning service personnel are exposed to noxious cleaning chemicals several days a week. Bad weather can mean cancellations or jobs rescheduled into what is already a hectic timetable. And it can be lonely, as most work independently, calling in additional help only for the larger, commercial jobs.

Shunning traditional jobs, the owners of cleaning businesses in town make their own hours, set their own rates, and work at their own pace. For Newtown’s cleaning providers, though, their work is a source of pride as well as a means of earning income tailored to fit their time and family commitments.

Every cleaning service, of course, has its own approach.

Newtown resident Sharon Lucsky likes to focus in on the job when she arrives at one of the 11 homes she cares for in Newtown. She is usually there by 7:30 am, four days a week. The television stays off, the radio is silent, and no headphones channel music as she goes about her business. Working rapidly, she provides her own beat, vacuuming, mopping, scrubbing, and dusting.

She has been in the cleaning business for 17 years. Prior to having her own business, Ms Lucsky spent several years as a waitress, but found the money and job satisfaction higher in the household help area. Nor was it an unknown venture; her mother had her own cleaning business and as a child, Ms Lucsky often accompanied her on jobs.

“I’m naturally very domestic, I like being in people’s homes,” she says, echoing the sentiments of others in the business. “When I waitressed, I had to please 60 people in a day, as opposed to pleasing three or four people a day [cleaning homes].”

Pleasing customers is a lot of work. Some house cleaners rely on their customers to provide the proper cleaning equipment, but Ms Lucsky prefers her own tools of the trade. Boxes of rags and cleaners, various mops, and an Electrolux vacuum, which she replaces every year, are hauled in and out of the houses she services, not a small job.

“You have to be physically fit for it [cleaning],” says Ms Lucsky. To do a thorough job means stretching up high, bending down low, reaching over, behind, and between objects. It sounds like enough of a workout on its own, but this house cleaner finds that time at the gym doing more stretching and lifting weights is time well spent.

Ms Lucsky feels fortunate to have “wonderful, wonderful clients” in Newtown, but offers some advice to those considering outside help.

“There is no amount of money to pay for lack of respect,” she says. “We get hot, we get cold.”

Surprisingly, clients who are not home will forget to turn up the heat in winter, or turn on the air conditioning and fans in the summer, making hard work even harder.

Others in the cleaning business echo her sentiments when she suggests, “Pets should be confined somewhere safe during cleaning, and it’s a nuisance when people don’t pick up to prepare for you to work.”

Ms Lucsky owns a four-wheel drive vehicle, a must, she says, to get in and out of driveways during New England winters. She can always get to work, but once there, she might encounter the number one pet peeve of domestic help: when snowy sidewalks are not shoveled, and the path to the door is not cleared.

The money she earns is a reward, of course, but there is one more satisfaction Ms Lucsky finds in her job: “I love to vacuum. I can see where I’ve been, the nap of the rug comes up and I vacuum backward, so there are no footprints. Vacuuming is my reward for all I’ve done in the house.”

Finding A Niche

Not only does White Glove Cleaning of Sandy Hook enjoy the satisfaction of a well-vacuumed carpet, they then work some further magic. This cleaning company has been providing carpet and upholstery cleaning in the area since 1998, using a special “bonnet” method of cleaning rather than steam cleaning, and they also offer rewaxing for tile floors. Customers with Oriental or Persian rugs rely on them to safely, carefully, and thoroughly clean their valuable floor coverings. In a competitive business, they feel they have cut out a special niche for themselves with these added services.

Another area of expertise for this family-owned business is “final” cleaning — that gigantic cleaning job that occurs when people move in and out of a residence. It means cleaning a house to stand up to the scrutiny of a potential buyer or new owner, and can take hours of hard labor to do properly.

“It’s a demanding job. The day is very busy,” says the owner of White Glove, agreeing with her fellow business associates. “Everyone cleans differently and everyone has different expectations. We have to deal with a lot of different personalities and attitudes.”

Compared to residential cleaning, commercial cleaning is a pretty straight road, and White Glove is the cleaning service for many area businesses.

Regardless of whether it is a residence or a commercial account, this company emphasizes building trust into each of its business relationships, and stresses the little extras when on a job to make sure the clientele gets what it pays for.

“We always look up! There are no shortcuts.”

Like White Glove Cleaning, the service employed to keep The Newtown Bee spick-and-span says that one of the benefits of cleaning a commercial space is that there is more flexibility of time.

“Houses need to be cleaned during daylight hours. You can clean an office at midnight, or early in the morning if you want.”

Having the peace and quiet of an empty building leaves a lot of thinking time, too. According to this cleaning couple, work becomes almost automated, as they work together to get the job done.

Cleaning The Newtown Bee is a little like cleaning a large, well-traversed home. People traipsing in and out from dawn to dusk leave plenty of grit throughout the office for the “beekeepers,” who live in Roxbury, who asked not to be identified for this story. And while there are bathrooms to clean and plenty of floors to mop, it is the multitude of knick-knacks, antiques, and bee paraphernalia that make dusting at The Bee a challenge.

“Experience tells you,” they say, “not to move valuable antiques.”

They are also responsible for keeping the popcorn wagon clean, a unique antique with which visitors to The Bee are familiar. The Bee’s service people use a special combination of dish detergent and ammonia to clean up the greasy, buttery splatters from the popper’s glass windows, thus avoiding smeary results.

Like other cleaning professionals, they find that the money is good, but warn that there are downsides to their profession.

“If there’s no work, people go away, there’s no pay. There is no provided health insurance, and that can get expensive. If you want vacation time, you don’t get paid.”

The physical demands of the cleaning business take a toll on the body, too, as workers get older, probably the biggest drawback.

Being Your Own Boss

Yet, like so many others, the pride of being their own boss and in charge of their own time outweighs any negative aspects of the job; so day in, day out, morning, noon and night, they are swept up in their work.

Another Newtowner who enjoys her work is Kathy of K’s Cleaning. As a single parent, she found that the pay and flexibility of hours fit into her life perfectly when she started her business in 1987.

At the start of each four-to-five-hour shift at any of the ten Newtown homes she cleans, she zeroes in on the job to be done, preferring the hum of the vacuum to radios, CDs, or any other background noise. She moves methodically from room to room, hoping the clients have remembered to pick up, moving furniture and doodads out of the way, and watching out for roving pets. Unfriendly encounters with overprotective dogs have left her wary, but for the most part, pets are generally secured in crates or confined areas, a practice for which she is grateful.

There are disadvantages to her business, she admits, particularly the physical demands of shifting furniture, and wear and tear on the knees from repetitious squatting and standing. She has suffered from fatigue and allergies induced by certain cleaning products.

Like the keepers of The Bee, she laments the lack of available health insurance for independent business owners. Last minute cancellations mean no pay for the day, and she has seen the effect of the economy on service businesses.

“It’s harder to get work now. It’s kind of a luxury,” she observes.

But her customers, some of whom she has served long enough to watch the children grow up and start their own families, are so considerate and appreciative, it makes up for the low points.

“You work with people you want to be with and work for. It’s like going to a relative’s house; you catch up and gab if the people are home.”

In a world regulated by clocks and deadlines, these professionals have chosen to walk an independent path. It is not always easy and can be fraught with financial difficulties and health hazards; nonetheless, cleaning services are there to work their magic and turn your fantasy into reality.

But at the end of the day, don’t look for any telltale magic dust..