The question we get on almost every first call is some version of "how often do I actually need this?" The honest answer is that it depends on the apartment and the people in it, but there is a baseline: for a one- or two-bedroom in Manhattan with one or two adults, a professional clean every two weeks keeps the place genuinely clean rather than just tidy. Weekly is a luxury that pays for itself if you work long hours; monthly works if you're neat and home a lot.
Start with who lives there. Every person adds foot traffic, skin cells and whatever they walked through on the sidewalk; every child adds spills and fingerprints at hip height; every dog or cat adds hair, dander and, sooner or later, an accident. A family of four with a dog in a three-bedroom is at the far end of that scale, and for them we'd say weekly, or every two weeks with a deep clean each season. A single person in a studio can stretch to monthly without the apartment looking or smelling any different.
Then there's New York itself. The black dust that appears on the sills a day after you wipe them is real — brake dust, construction, exhaust — and it comes in through every window and air conditioner. Apartments on an avenue collect it faster than apartments on a side street; anything below the fifth floor collects it faster than anything above the fifteenth. Radiators bake it onto the walls behind them every winter. If you live on a busy avenue with the windows open, the sills, the blinds and the top of the fridge need more attention than the same apartment on a quiet block.
A home office changes things too. Someone home all day means a kitchen used three times a day instead of once, a bathroom used all day, and a desk area that collects cups, dust and crumbs. Two people working from home in a one-bedroom is, for cleaning purposes, roughly the same load as a family.
Between visits, the two things that make the biggest difference are shoes and the kitchen. Shoes off at the door keeps most of the street out of the apartment; a wipe of the counters and stovetop each night keeps the grease from building into something that needs scrubbing. Neither replaces a professional clean, but both are the reason one apartment on a bi-weekly schedule looks better than another on the same schedule.
The signs it's overdue, in the order we see them: the bathroom grout has gone from white to grey; there's a film on the kitchen cabinet doors near the stove that a wipe doesn't take off; dust bunnies under the bed and behind the radiator; the sills are grey again the day after you dust them; and a smell you've stopped noticing but visitors haven't. Any one of those and it's time.
One more thing worth knowing: waiting doesn't save money. A regular clean on a schedule is a couple of hours; the first clean of an apartment that has been let go is a deep clean, at deep-clean time and price. Most of our regular customers started with a deep clean and then went bi-weekly, and the bi-weekly visits are quicker and cheaper because there's nothing to catch up on.
Not sure where your apartment falls? Call AD Cleaning and Painting at (914) 501-4690. We'll walk through it with you, tell you honestly what it needs, and put the price in writing before we bring anything in — in English or Spanish, and 15% off your first service.