How to Get Your Home Ready for a Deep Clean (You Don't Need to Clean First)

A woman in Elmwood once spent her Tuesday morning scrubbing the bathroom before we arrived to deep clean her bathroom. I didn’t say anything until we were loading the van back up, and then I asked why. She laughed and said she didn’t want us to think she lived like that. I think about that conversation more than I should.

So before anything else: you do not need to clean your house before we come to clean it. That’s the whole point of calling us. But there is a short list of things that actually help, and getting them backwards is the single most common way people waste money on a deep clean without realizing it.

What “getting ready” actually means

People hear “get the house ready” and picture tidying. What we actually need is access. Those are different jobs, and only one of them matters to us.

Access means: can we get to the thing we’re cleaning without moving a pile of your stuff first. If there’s a basket of laundry on the bathroom floor, we’ll just set it on the bed for twenty minutes — that costs nothing. If there are three bins of kids’ toys stacked in front of the baseboard heater, someone has to move those bins before anyone can touch the baseboard, and that someone is either you, ahead of time, for free, or us, during the visit, at the hourly rate. That’s the only math that matters here.

Clear a path to the big stuff

Our deep clean pulls the fridge out from the wall and gets behind it — that’s standard, not an add-on, and we go into exactly what’s covered in what’s included in a deep clean. For that to go fast, the floor in front of the fridge needs to be clear. Same logic for closets if you’ve asked for anything inside them, and for any furniture sitting against a wall you want the baseboards cleaned behind.

You don’t need to empty the fridge. You don’t need to pull it out yourself — that’s our job, and honestly I’d rather you not strain your back doing it for us the night before. Just make sure there’s a straight line to it.

The oven thing nobody tells you

Here’s a genuinely useful one: if your oven has a self-clean cycle, don’t run it the morning we’re coming, or even the night before. It bakes residue into ash, which helps a little, but it also leaves a strong burnt-chemical smell that lingers for hours and doesn’t do your house any favours while we’re trying to work through the rest of it. If you want to run it, do it two or three days ahead so the smell’s long gone, and let us handle the inside from there either way.

Pets

Most people keep pets in one closed-off room while we work, and it’s fine. A bedroom with the door shut and water available is plenty. If a dog gets genuinely anxious around strangers or equipment noise — the carpet machine isn’t quiet — tell us when you book so we can plan the order of rooms and give you a heads-up before we start it. Cats mostly just relocate themselves to wherever’s farthest from the noise and reappear once we’ve left. We wrote more about the pet-specific side of a deep clean, hair and all, in deep cleaning a home with pets.

Parking, because this is Winnipeg

In July this barely matters. In January it’s the actual logistics problem. If you’ve got a driveway, leave a spot clear. If it’s street parking only and your block does odd-even snow routes or a scheduled plow, check the signage the day before — we’ve shown up to a perfectly good appointment and burned fifteen minutes looking for a legal spot two blocks over because nobody mentioned it. A text the night before with “park on the even side” or “use the back lane, gate’s unlocked” saves everyone the fifteen minutes, and fifteen minutes on a deep clean is real money.

Fragile things and anything you’d rather we didn’t move

We’re careful, but careful isn’t the same as psychic. If there’s a shelf of things that matter to you — photos, something inherited, a kid’s art taped to the fridge you don’t want touched — just point it out or set it somewhere out of the way for the visit. Most people never think to mention this until something’s already been moved, and by then it’s an awkward conversation nobody needed to have.

Do you need to be home?

Not for the whole thing, but someone needs to let us in and be reachable if we find something worth a quick call — a cabinet that’s not what it looked like in the quote, a mark on a wall that turns out to be damage rather than dirt. A lot of people go run errands and come back partway through. That’s completely normal and honestly makes for a quieter house to work in.

The one thing that actually saves you money

If there’s a specific thing you care about — “please really get the grout in the main bathroom” or “the oven is the whole reason I’m calling” — say that when you book, not when we’re halfway done. We budget time across the whole house based on what we’re told going in, and a late add-on mid-visit means either rushing something else or running longer than planned. A thirty-second heads-up when you call beats a surprise at hour three, every time.

Booking one

If you’re not sure whether what you need is a deep clean or something smaller, our piece on move-out cleaning vs. deep cleaning walks through the difference — a deep clean is for a home you’re still living in, worked around your furniture, not an empty house ahead of a possession date. If it is possession day you’re dealing with, the move-out calculator prices that instead.

We deep clean homes right across the city, from bungalows in Transcona to character houses in Elmwood and everywhere between. Get in touch with your home size, whether there’s carpet, and the one thing you most want us to focus on, and we’ll reply the same day with an estimate and an arrival time. You really don’t have to clean before we show up. Just leave us a path to the fridge.