Degreasing Kitchen Cabinets – are you supposed to do that on every clean or is that a special project? The client’s kitchen cupboards are always icky, sticky with greasy gunk and you can never seem to get them clean.
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Hey there, I’m Angela Brown, and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question, and I get to help you find an answer. You can find this and 400 other answered questions in this series on our YouTube channel.
Is De-Greasing Kitchen Cabinets Maintenance Cleaning?
Is de-greasing kitchen cabinets, part of a maintenance or routine cleaning? There is a house cleaner who wrote into the show.
She says, “Hi, I have a question. Is polishing kitchen cabinets, part of routine maintenance. I have a client who seems to think it is. It’s a lot of work and time-consuming. I find myself rushing through her home to make sure I get out on time because I know they don’t want to pay extra. She asks me to wipe the obvious fingerprints every time I arrive, but there are prints on all of them and it’s not just wiping. Water doesn’t remove oil from our fingers. They have to be cleaned with something. They’re almost dark chocolate in color. So everything looks smeared when wiped. There’s no way around it, I’m not feeling it’s fair for me and I don’t know how to confront it.”
Did You Have a Conversation About Payments?
Okay. First, there are a couple of things there that I wanted to target. And then we’ll go back and we’ll answer the question. One of them said you know she doesn’t want to pay more. Is that a conversation that you’ve had, or is this guesswork that you have going through your head?
And I have to ask, because there are a lot of house cleaners in the back of their mind, because of how they would respond, they assume the customer would also respond the same way. Obviously, if the woman is asking every time to wipe the obvious fingerprints off the countertops, that is obviously important to her. If there are cabinets and countertops that have greasy fingerprints that like you said are dark in color, that’s probably from peanut butter or a chocolate kind of frosting or whatever. Maybe kids are touching the cupboards and opening the cupboard doors and they’re smearing gunk on those cupboards and that’s important to her, which is why she keeps bringing it up.
If She Keeps Asking, Have a New Conversation
And so if she keeps bringing it up, what I recommend is that you have a new conversation and say, “Hey, listen, I want to share with you my concerns because I have a certain amount of time allotted for cleaning your house. If I’m spending extra time cleaning the decreasing part and removing the oils from your cupboards, that is a different project altogether.
And I’m afraid I’m skipping other parts of your house when I’m focusing on the cabinets. Are the cabinets the number one and priority and what else in the house would you like me to remove from our current cleaning so that I can do a fair job to everything in your house?”
We Have Special Projects We Can Do
And if she doesn’t want to remove anything, maybe we could do the cupboards as a separate project. Now, at Savvy Cleaner, we have what we call special projects. One of them is cleaning the outside of kitchen cabinets for this very reason. There does get grease and gunk and stuff built up around the knobs on the cabinet doors.
So as a special project for a home like this, where it happens a lot, you may want to do this once a quarter, where you come in and you actually use a de-greaser and you use a drill bit brush and you take the handles off and you soak them and you wash them and you get all the gunk off the handles themselves. You polish the cabinets and make them look as good as new.
Greasing the Cabinets is a Special Project
That is a special project. You use special equipment, you have special personal protective equipment, it’s special pricing. It’s a separate day on the calendar. And so it’s scheduled separately from the regular house cleaning so that you have fair time to go through the entire house on the regular maintenance clean.
Now, what we do include as part of maintenance clean now, since COVID, is we do wipe all of the handle knobs down in the kitchen as a high touch area. So every single knob would get wiped down, but the area around it, not so much. What we do on a maintenance clean is standing with our feet flat on the floor, our hand above our head, and a Swiffer duster in our hand.
And that is the mode that we use as far as how tall you are. Everything that you can reach while standing on the floor, not a step stool, but standing on the floor, is considered maintenance clean.
Dusting the Cabinets Isn’t a Special Project
So you would be able to dust the cabinets, but you’re not removing the grease from the front of them. Okay? So you’re wiping the knobs down, but the area around, if there are fingerprints and all that stuff, that would be included in a special project for the very reasons that I just mentioned.
\It is time-consuming, it does require special equipment. And like you said, it’s not something you probably are going to be able to do at every clean unless you and the client agreed to that and you want to remove other tasks from your current house cleaning setup. Okay? And the reason I say that is because it sounds like it is important to her.
There Needs to Be a Standard You Offer
Now, I don’t want to recommend that you customize each cleaning to every single home. There needs to be a standard that you offer, which is why we offer the standard special packages that are separate.
And one of the things that are really fun about this is if it is a house that has lots of kids, and I don’t know if it is or not, but one of the things that you might mention is that there are other programs like the Mommy’s Helper program, where you come in every single day or someone from your team comes in every day for one hour and they help tidy up the home.
That might be a special project that they do on a daily basis where they’re wiping down all the cupboards every single day so there’s no buildup on that.
Make Sure You’re Both on the Same Page
So those are just a couple of things that I would recommend to make sure that you and the customer are playing on the same page because what’s interesting is the customer is paying for a service and if they’re not getting what they’re looking for, they’re going to be disappointed and disillusioned.
And if you’re not getting what you’re looking for, you’re going to be disappointed and disillusioned. And like you said, you’re going to feel like you’re being taken advantage of.
But what it comes down to is just raw bare-bones, crystal clear communication. So I want to recommend that you guys have a new conversation and that you give her a couple of different options so that there are no surprises for either one of you.
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