We clean every hallway the same way

We clean shared areas on a schedule

A lobby gets dirty in the same places every week. The first few feet inside the front door take the grit off every shoe. The mailbox wall collects fingerprints, and the elevator floor holds whatever the lobby did not catch. Recurring cleaning means we come back on a fixed day and work those spots in the same order each time. Nothing gets skipped because somebody was in a hurry.

We work from the top down and from dry to wet. Dust comes off the ledges and handrails first, so it lands on a floor we have not cleaned yet. The glass on the entry doors comes next. The floor is last. We sweep it, then mop with a clean head and fresh water, working from the far wall back toward the door. If you reverse that order, you mop the floor and then drop dust on it.

Done right, a lobby still looks clean the day before our next visit. That is the test we care about. When tenants start leaving notes about the stairwell, it usually means the stairwell got the quick version several visits in a row. We keep a written list for each building we clean. That list is how we make sure the quick version never turns into the routine.

• Entry glass and door handles wiped down
• Lobby and hallway floors swept and mopped
• Stairwells swept one landing at a time
• Elevator cab walls and floor cleaned
• Mailbox area and handrails dusted

Bronx winters put salt on every floor

From the first snow until spring, every tenant carries rock salt and slush into the building. Salt dries into a white film on the floor. On the terrazzo and marble found in many Bronx lobbies, that film dulls the finish and works its way into the grout. Plain water just moves it around. On a winter visit we mop the entry more than once and change the water between passes until the mop comes up clean.

Mats matter more than most people think. A runner inside the front door catches a lot of salt before it reaches the hallway, but only if someone lifts it and cleans under it. A mat left down all winter turns into a salt pan, and the floor underneath gets etched in the shape of the mat. Through the cold months we lift the entry mats on every visit and clean the floor under them.

Summer brings a different problem. Humidity in a closed stairwell makes dust stick to the railings and leaves a tacky film on painted walls near the ground floor. Radiator season does the opposite. It dries the air, so fine dust floats and settles on every ledge. A schedule that works in January needs small changes by July, so we adjust each building's list for the season instead of running the same routine all year.

Older Bronx buildings need gentler cleaning

Much of the housing around Kingsbridge and Riverdale is prewar brick apartment buildings, many of them six stories with an elevator. Closer to Fordham and Bedford Park you also find walk-ups and row houses. The lobbies in these buildings often have terrazzo floors, marble wall panels and old tile in the hallways. These materials last for generations when they are cleaned gently. They wear out fast when someone uses the wrong product on them.

Marble and terrazzo do not handle acid well. Vinegar mixes and many bathroom cleaners etch the surface and leave dull patches that no amount of mopping will bring back. We use a neutral cleaner on stone floors and save the stronger products for the places that need them. Old hexagon tile in hallways has wide grout lines that hold dirt. Those floors get scrubbed with a brush along the grout, because a wet mop alone leaves the dirt behind.

Walk-up stairwells show it fast when cleaning gets skipped. The treads collect dust in the back corner of each step, where a quick sweep rarely reaches. We start at the top landing and work down, and we do the back corner of each tread before the rest of the step. Skip those corners for a month and you will see a gray line on every step from the top floor to the lobby.

Eco friendly cleaning suits shared spaces

Everyone in the building shares the lobby, including kids and older tenants. Strong fumes in a closed stairwell hang around for hours because very little air moves through it. Eco friendly cleaning is one of the services on our listing, and shared areas are where it makes the most sense. Most of the dirt in a lobby is grit and tracked in salt, and neither one needs a harsh chemical to come up.

How you clean matters more than what you clean with. Microfiber cloths pick dust up instead of pushing it around. A mop head that gets changed between floors does not carry one hallway's dirt into the next one. We keep separate cloths for elevator buttons and door handles, so grime from the trash room never ends up on something tenants touch. Clean tools with mild cleaners do a better job than dirty tools with strong ones.

Trash and recycling rooms are the one place where stronger cleaning is sometimes needed. Spills in there go sour fast in a warm Bronx summer, and the smell travels up the stairwell. We clean the floor and the lower walls in those rooms on every visit. When a spill is more than a regular visit can handle, we tell the building manager, so the problem gets fixed instead of covered up with air freshener.