How to tell your property needs professional cleaning

Some facilities such as tall buildings are best cleaned by professionals. PHOTO BY RACHEL MABALA

Are you tired of cleaning? There times when one realises their property needs more cleaning than they are able to do. This is when you need professional cleaners. Professional cleaners have evolved over time expanding their services from offices to private homes.
Victoria Nanozi, the chief executive officer, Nissi Cleaning Services describes professional cleaning as a paid for service that relies on extensive training, experience and quality cleaning products to achieve a certain quality level that is nearly impossible to achieve by ordinary cleaners.

Nanozi notes that professional cleaning entails routine cleaning which can be daily, bi-weekly, monthly or even quarterly depending on one’s preference. The cleaning can be specialised in carpets, upholstery, windows, gutters or even the roof, among many others such as doing laundry, car cleaning and even swimming pool cleaning.

Why professional cleaner
To the uninitiated using a professional cleaning service can seem as an unnecessary luxury. For Ninah Nyamigisha, hiring the services of a professional cleaner helped transform her home.

“The cleaning company left my place looking not just clean and tidy but it also smelled better and I was left wondering how I could have allowed myself to live in such an unhealthy environment all that time,” Nyamigisha shares.

This, she says inspired her to rearrange her home since it looked and felt more spacious and worthy of her efforts.

Doreen Bisanga Tetui, the CEO Twinkie Sparkle says professional cleaning is always done to a high standard with attention to detail, an element the househelp might miss.

Tetui notes that it focuses on eliminating dust, allergens and bacteria, “this form of cleaning pays attention to every aspect of one’s living space.”

There are a number of variables to consider when pricing a cleaning service.

According to Nanozi, the cost of cleaning can vary from Shs250,000 for a deep clean of a two bedroom house to Shs3- Shs4m for bigger properties. The cost is determined by the equipment needed to clean, how often, what is being cleaned, amount of time required and the detergents that will be used among others.

There is also attention to the environment and the people living in it and the appropriate cleaning procedures.

Tetui further highlights that unlike regular cleaning, professional cleaning saves times and the results last longer.

When to call the professional
Nanozi says that people have a lot to juggle and somehow, some part will be forgotten. In most cases, the home is left to the mercy of the house help who are usually untrained or unmotivated enough to clean thoroughly. In other cases, the homeowner sacrifices time to handle the cleaning themselves.

“What people have not yet understood is time is a valuable commodity. So the time you spend struggling to clean your property is valuable time you could use to invest in an income generating activity. So if you find yourself spending valuable time cleaning, it is time to let the professionals help you which is cheaper in the long run,” Nanozi recommends.
In case your home is very big, in that one or two people cannot handle the daily cleaning, or when a building has complicated structures like tall buildings which require particular technology to be cleaned, a delicate surface that easily gets spoilt by particular detergents like some stones or wood, then it is time to call in a professional cleaner.

When it comes to organisations, companies or institutions that often face a challenge of managing non-core staff, then a professional cleaning company is what you might need.

After occupancy cleaning
Sunday Atanazio, a real estate agent and broker shares that landlords should also consider professional cleaning services when tenants move out.
“It is only common decency for a tenant to leave the house they have been occupying as clean as possible. But most do not, so it becomes the duty of the landlord to ensure that the place is clean and ready for a new tenant. The landlord has to make sure that the kitchen, bedrooms and bathrooms are clean and the walls have a fresh coat of paint all the time, so that when a tenant is leaving they leave behind a pristine property,” Atanazio explains.

This he says is why landlords usually charge the security deposit to tenants to cover such costs. Atanazio adds that once a tenant starts living in a place, maintaining the cleanliness of the property is their role although external structures such as compound, roofs and the like should be solely managed by the landlord because it is their property and responsibility.