We scrub floors until the grease lifts

We clean offices from the top down

Office cleaning goes in one direction, top to bottom. We start with the air vents and the tops of the light fixtures. That is where dust sits in a Phoenix building that runs its air conditioning most of the year. Then come the desks and counters. The floor is always last. Do the floor first and the vents after, and the dust you knock loose lands on a floor you just paid to have cleaned.

The break room gets its own pass. Microwaves and coffee makers put steam and a little grease into the air all day. It settles on the cabinet fronts and on the floor in front of the counter. Wiping that with a damp rag just smears it around. We put a degreaser on and give it a few minutes to break the film down. Then we scrub and rinse, so the surface ends up clean instead of streaked.

Touch points get disinfectant, and the disinfectant gets time to work. Door handles, light switches, the fridge handle and shared phones carry the most hands in an office. A disinfectant only kills germs if the surface stays wet for the contact time printed on the label. The dry air here can flash a light spray off a counter fast. So we put down enough to stay wet, let it sit, then wipe. Spray and wipe in one motion cleans the surface but does not disinfect it.

• Ceiling vents and light fixtures dusted first
• Break room kitchen degreased and sanitized
• Handles and switches disinfected with full contact time
• Hard floors scrubbed, then rinsed with clean water
• Spills cleaned up before they set

Grease film builds up on work floors

Any floor near a kitchen collects grease, even in an office. Cooking vapor rises, cools and falls back down, and it lands as a film too thin to see but easy to feel. Shoes pick it up and carry it down the hall. On vinyl tile you notice it as a dull, sticky path from the break room to the desks. On sealed concrete it shows up as dark traffic lanes that never seem to mop out.

A mop cannot fix this by itself. A string mop pushes grease into the grout lines and the seams between tiles. Once the mop water turns dirty, it spreads a fresh film across the whole floor. We put down a degreasing solution and let it work for a few minutes. Then we scrub it with a stiff brush and pick up the dirty solution. After that the floor gets rinsed with clean water. The rinse is the step most people skip, and it is why their floors feel tacky the next day.

When it is done right, the floor looks lighter and your shoe stops grabbing on it. The grout goes back toward its original color instead of staying dark. Skip the degreaser and the floor looks clean while it is wet, then turns dull again once it dries. Skip the rinse and the leftover cleaner becomes its own sticky layer. That layer holds on to whatever dust blows in next, and the floor looks dirty again within a week or two.

Phoenix dust gets into office buildings

Monsoon season brings dust storms that push fine desert dust under doors and into the air conditioning. Most office buildings around Phoenix are tilt-up concrete or block, with stucco outside and the air units up on a flat roof. Inside, a drop ceiling hides the return air space above the tiles. Dust rides that airflow in and settles on keyboards and along the tops of cubicle walls.

Dusting it dry just throws it back into the air, and the air conditioning carries it to the next room. We wipe with damp microfiber so the dust stays on the cloth. We rinse the cloths often, so one desk's dust does not get dragged onto the next. The ceiling tiles around each supply vent get a look too. A gray ring on the tile around a vent means dirt is blowing out of that vent every time the system turns on.

The water here is hard, and it leaves white spots and crust anywhere it dries. You see it on the break room faucet and on glass partitions near the sink. An everyday cleaner will not dissolve mineral scale. So the sink area gets a descaling cleaner and a scrub, then a rinse and a dry wipe. Left alone, the scale gives grime a rough surface to grip, and the sink stops looking clean no matter how often it gets wiped.

A spill left overnight is harder to remove

A sugary drink dries into a sticky patch that grabs every bit of grit walked across it. Cooking oil never really dries at all. It soaks into grout and into the pores of sealed concrete, and on carpet it wicks down into the backing. The longer either one sits, the more of it ends up below the surface, where a quick wipe cannot reach it.

For a spill on a hard floor we scrape up anything solid first. Then we put down a degreaser or a general cleaner, depending on what was spilled, and scrub. A rinse with clean water follows. On carpet we blot instead of rubbing, because rubbing pushes the stain wider and roughs up the fibers. Then we rinse the spot with clean water and blot again. Cleaner left in the carpet pulls dirt back to that same spot over the following weeks.

Spill cleanup is one of the services on our Google listing, and in any workplace with a kitchen it comes up often. An oil patch next to the break room counter is a slip hazard as much as it is a stain. We get it up completely, so there is nothing left to feel under a shoe. A floor can look clean and still be slick, and a mop by itself often leaves it exactly that way.