We save the floors for last

The cleanup starts at the ceiling

Drywall dust is finer than flour, and sanding one room puts it in the air of the whole house. It drifts for hours and lands on anything flat, from fan blades to window sills. It also gets inside any cabinet that was left open. So we start high. Fan blades and light globes get wiped first, then door tops and trim, then the walls where dust clings to the texture. Whatever we knock loose falls onto a floor we have not touched yet.

Next comes everything with an inside. Cabinet boxes, drawers, closet shelves and window tracks all collect a gray film. A new kitchen can also hold sawdust from the install in the back of each drawer. We vacuum those spaces out before we wipe them, because a damp cloth on loose dust turns it into a paste that dries in the corners. Stickers on new glass and tape marks on counters come off slowly. Scraping hard, or with the wrong tool, leaves a scratch that will not come out.

The floors come last, and they get two passes. First a vacuum with a brush head goes along the baseboards and into the corners, where the grit piles up. Then comes a damp mop. A dry mop only pushes fine dust around and leaves a haze you notice when the sun comes through the window. Carpet gets vacuumed slowly, in more than one direction. Floors that are made to take wax, like vinyl tile in a kitchen or a laundry room, can be waxed once they are clean.

• Fan blades and light fixtures wiped first
• Cabinets and drawers vacuumed inside, then wiped
• Stickers and tape marks lifted off glass
• Loose cabinet doors and towel bars tightened
• Floors vacuumed and damp mopped last

Oklahoma wind blows red dirt inside

A house under construction stays open to the weather for weeks. Doors get propped for the workers, and windows sometimes go in late. Around Shawnee the wind rarely lets up, and it carries the red clay dust this part of Oklahoma is known for. That dust mixes with the drywall and sawdust already inside and leaves a reddish film on sills and in corners. A duster will not move it. It needs a damp cloth and then a rinse, or it streaks.

Summer brings a second problem. In hot, humid weather, fine dust sticks to anything a little damp, like paint that has not cured or a mirror after the first shower. Scrubbing new paint hard takes the finish off with the dust. Fresh walls get a light wipe, and the heavier work goes to the trim and the glass. Winter air is dry, and the dust stays loose instead. That makes it easy to spread from room to room, so we keep doors closed as we go.

One more thing trips people up. If the heat or air ran while the drywall got sanded, the return vent pulled dust into the system. That dust keeps blowing back out. We wipe the vent covers and the return grille, and we will tell you if the filter looks gray. Cleaning the ducts themselves is a different trade. A spotless room with a clogged filter is dusty again within a few days, so the filter is worth a look before we leave.

The kind of house changes the cleanup

A lot of the housing in Shawnee and Tecumseh is brick ranch houses on concrete slabs. A remodel in one of those usually means a kitchen or bathroom gets torn out and rebuilt. The family often keeps living in the rest of the house. The dust does not stay in the room being worked on. It rides out on shoes and settles along the hallway and into the bedrooms. So we clean the path the workers walked, along with the room they worked in. Hallway carpet often holds more of it than the new tile does.

Closer to downtown Shawnee there are older wood frame houses on pier and beam foundations, with wood floors that have small gaps between the boards. Fine dust settles into those gaps and into old window frames, which have far more ledges and trim than a newer house. That trim has usually been painted many times, and sanding it makes a dust you do not want tracked through the home. We pick it up with a vacuum and damp cloths, never a dry broom that throws it back into the air.

Out toward Bethel Acres and McLoud there are more manufactured homes and new builds on bigger lots. Manufactured homes often have vinyl floors that scratch when grit gets dragged across them, so a vacuum always goes over them before any mop. New builds bring their own mess: stickers on windows, paint on door hardware, caulk smudges around the tub and a gray haze on new tile. Light haze buffs off with a dry cloth. Heavy haze is something to raise with your tile installer before we start.

We tighten what the builders left loose

We also do light handyman work, and on a post construction job it fits at the end. After a remodel there is often a cabinet door that hangs crooked or a towel bar that wobbles on the wall. We are already wiping every cabinet and fixture in the room. Fixing those small things while we are there beats calling someone back for them later. Anything bigger, like wiring or plumbing, goes back to the contractor who did the work.

A finished room should pass a simple test. Run a finger along the top of a door frame and it comes back clean. Open a drawer and there is no sawdust in the corners. Look across the floor with the blinds open in the afternoon and you see no haze and no footprint trail. Mirrors and glass show no streaks when the light hits them from the side. That is the standard we check each room against before we leave.

Timing matters more than most people expect. If we clean while a painter or a flooring installer still has work left, their next day undoes ours. The right time is after the last contractor finishes and before the furniture and rugs come back in. That way we can reach every baseboard and the floor where the couch will sit. On a new build, that is the gap between the final inspection and the day the furniture arrives. Call (405) 821-0861, Monday to Saturday from 10:00 AM to 8:00 PM, to pick a date.