Century & Heritage Home Cleaning · Cambridge

Century Home Cleaning in Galt, Preston and Hespeler

Cambridge has one of the best stocks of century housing in the region, and most of it is being cleaned with methods designed for a 2015 subdivision. Original hardwood, plaster and heavy trim need a different approach.

Walk the streets above the Grand in West Galt, or up Dickson Hill, or through the older blocks off King Street in Preston and the mill-village core of Hespeler, and you're looking at houses built between roughly 1860 and 1930. Stone and buff brick, high ceilings, plaster over lath, deep baseboards, picture rails, transom windows over the interior doors, hardwood that has been down for a hundred years, cast-iron radiators, and a basement with stone or rubble walls. Every one of those features changes how the house gets cleaned.

Floors

Old hardwood is usually finished in shellac, wax or a thin aged polyurethane, and often all three in different rooms. It is damp-mopped with a barely-wet flat mop and a neutral pH cleaner. No steam mops — steam drives moisture into the seams and can haze or lift an old finish permanently. No flooding, no oil soaps left to sit, no wet mop parked in a corner. Where boards have opened up, the gaps get vacuumed with a crevice tool rather than washed.

Plaster, trim and millwork

Plaster walls and original painted trim take no abrasives and no scrubbing pads. Deep baseboards, wide casings, picture rails and door mouldings are hand-washed, and the flat top edge of every casing — the ledge nobody can see from the floor — is where a century home stores its dust. Transom windows and the glass above the doors are on the list too.

Radiators

Cast-iron radiators build a dense felt of dust between the fins that a vacuum wand skims over. They get brushed out with a long radiator brush, vacuumed and wiped, and the wall and floor behind them done at the same time. On a rotation, twice a year is the minimum in a heavily used house; before the heating season starts is the sensible time, because that dust is what you smell in October.

Staircases

A century staircase — treads, risers, spindles, newel post, handrail, and the panelling on the open side — is hand work. There is no machine for it. It's the single most commonly under-quoted item in an old-house clean, and it's counted properly at the walkthrough instead of being absorbed and then quietly skipped.

Basements

Stone and rubble-wall cellars shed grit and always will. The realistic goal is control: the stairs and handrail cleaned, the floor swept and the reachable surfaces dusted, cobwebs off the joists, and the laundry area properly done. Anyone promising a spotless 1890s stone basement is telling you what you want to hear.

What isn't touched

Homes built before 1960 may contain lead-based paint under later coats, and homes built before the 1990s may contain asbestos in old pipe wrap, vermiculite insulation and some floor tiles. Cleaning never sands, scrapes or disturbs any of it. Flaking paint, damaged pipe wrap and loose vermiculite are reported to you and left alone — that's abatement work for a licensed contractor, not a cleaning job.

If the house is designated

Some Cambridge properties are designated or listed under the Ontario Heritage Act. Cleaning doesn't trigger anything in that regard, but it's still worth telling us about original finishes you don't want touched with anything but water. The Ontario Heritage Trust publishes maintenance guidance for older buildings that's worth a read if you've just bought one.

Frequently asked questions

Serving Cambridge and surrounding areas. Contact us for a no-obligation quote specific to your property.