We clean each room top to bottom

A deep clean starts at the ceiling

We work from the top of the room down, because dust falls. We start with ceiling fan blades, light fixtures, air vents and the tops of door frames. Then we move down to window sills, baseboards and cabinet fronts. The floors come last. If you mop first and dust the fan after, gray fuzz lands on a floor you just finished. The room looks like nobody touched it.

In the kitchen, grease is the problem. Cooking leaves a thin film on cabinet fronts, the range hood and the wall behind the stove, and dust sticks to that film. A dry rag just smears it around. We put a degreaser on, give it time to work, then wipe and dry, so the wood or paint underneath looks like itself again. Handles and pulls get the same care, since that is where hands leave the most oil.

Bathrooms take the longest. Soap and body oil build a dull film on tile and shower glass that a quick spray never breaks down. We scrub the grout lines, the corners of the tub and the track of the shower door. Then we clean the mirrors and faucets and dry them so they do not spot. The last job in there is the floor around and behind the toilet. People check that spot first, and a rushed cleaning skips it.

• Ceiling fans and light fixtures dusted first
• Baseboards and door frames wiped down
• Cabinet fronts and handles degreased
• Showers scrubbed and toilet bases cleaned
• Floors vacuumed, then mopped to the edges

Oklahoma wind puts red dirt everywhere

The wind here carries fine red dirt, and it does not stay outside. It rides in on shoes and dogs, blows through the gaps around doors and windows, and settles as a rust colored dust on sills and baseboards. On light carpet and grout it leaves a reddish cast. A damp rag pushed over it only turns it into a thin red paste, so we lift the dry dust first and wipe after.

Oklahoma gets heavy pollen in the spring, and cedar trees add their own in the winter months. It settles on the same flat surfaces as the dirt: window sills, picture frames, fan blades and the slats of blinds. Blinds are slow work when they are done right. Each slat gets wiped on both sides, because dusting one side knocks the dust onto the other side and the sill below. In a house with allergies, skipping the blinds leaves the worst of it in the room.

Summers here are hot and sticky, and the air conditioning runs for months. Every time it cycles, it pulls dust through the return and pushes it back out of the vents. The vent covers turn gray and the ceiling around them gets a dark smudge. In bathrooms, steam with no place to go feeds mildew along the caulk and the top of the shower. We scrub those spots out instead of wiping over them, since a wipe only hides mildew for a week or so.

Shawnee houses hide dust in different places

The older neighborhoods close to downtown Shawnee have a lot of wood frame houses with tall baseboards, wood floors and trim with grooves cut into it. Many of these sit on pier and beam foundations, with a crawl space under the floor. Dust works up through the small gaps between the boards. Every groove in the trim holds a line of it, so we wipe the trim with a damp cloth and dry it right away. Old wood does not do well left wet.

Brick ranch houses on a concrete slab are common across Shawnee and Tecumseh. Many have the kitchen open to the living room, so cooking grease travels farther than people expect. It lands on the nearest ceiling fan and on top of the fridge. Carpet in these houses often gets a dark line along the walls, where air pushes under the baseboards and leaves fine dust behind. We go along every wall with the vacuum's edge tool before the main passes.

Out toward Bethel Acres and across the county, plenty of families live in manufactured homes on a few acres, often down a gravel or dirt road. Road dust comes in with every trip in and out of the house. These homes usually have vinyl covered wall panels, vinyl floors and plastic tub surrounds, and those surfaces scratch under a rough scrub pad. We use soft pads and a gentler cleaner on them. Then we spend extra time on the floor by the door, where the road dirt piles up.

The floors get cleaned last

Floors come last because everything above them drops onto them. We vacuum first, hard floors included, so the mop is not pushing grit and hair around. The vacuum goes along the baseboards and under the edges of beds and couches, which is where most of the dust in a room ends up. Then we mop. Skip the vacuum and the mop turns loose dirt into muddy streaks that dry in the corners.

The mop water gets changed often. Dirty water spread across a floor dries into a gray film you can feel under bare feet. Too much cleaner does the same thing, because leftover soap stays sticky and grabs the next dirt that walks in. On tile we work the grout lines, not just the face of the tile. An old wood floor gets a damp mop with very little water, since standing water swells the boards and dulls the finish.

When a deep clean is finished, you should be able to run a hand along the top of a baseboard and come away clean. You should be able to walk barefoot across the kitchen without feeling grit. The house should not smell like heavy perfume covering things up. Aron Pringle wrote this on Google: "The house looked and smelled great after the work was completed." That is the standard we hold every room to.