The hour a clean happens changes how good it is. Two of our rules about timing have nothing to do with our own convenience.
Almost every argument we have had with a new customer about scheduling has turned out to be about the hour rather than the day. Two of our rules on that are worth explaining, because from the outside they look like we are being difficult.
The first is that offices are cleaned in the evening, after seven, and not during the working day. A vacuum beside somebody on a call is a bad experience for them and a rushed job for us. More than that, a desk cannot be cleaned properly while somebody is sitting at it, so daytime office cleaning quietly becomes emptying bins and wiping the parts nobody is using. Evening cleaning means the floors get done in one pass, the meeting rooms get done at all, and the office arrives in the morning to a room that was finished rather than worked around. It costs us more in staff hours and it is the only version of the service we offer.
The second is that wet work in homes happens in the morning, ideally before ten. Anything involving water in this climate has to have the rest of the day to dry: mopped floors, extraction cleaning on a sofa or a mattress, a bathroom done properly. A sofa cleaned at four in the afternoon is damp at bedtime, and a damp sofa in a closed flat overnight smells for two days and can end up worse than before we came. Customers sometimes ask us to come at five because that suits them, and for a dry clean we will. For upholstery we say no and explain why, and we would rather lose the booking than do it knowing how it will turn out.
There is a third piece of timing that is about us, and it is fair to say so. We do not book a deep clean and a full guesthouse round on the same team on the same day. Eight hours of deep cleaning is real physical work, and the second job of that day is never as good as the first. So the diary is built to keep the heavy jobs apart, which occasionally means offering a customer a day they did not ask for.
If the hour we suggest does not suit you, say so and we will find one that does. The only times we hold firm are the two above, and both of them are so that the work is still good the next morning.
