Before Your First Cleaning: What Our Team Brings, and the 3 Things to Have Ready

If you’ve never had a cleaning team in your home, the days before the first visit can bring up a lot of small questions. Do you need to buy supplies? Is there anything to get ready? What will the team need from you? Here’s how a first visit with Family Cleaners works, so you can plan your day with confidence.

What Our Team Brings

Our team arrives with its own cleaning products and equipment, and every cleaner is trained on the products we use. You don’t need to research brands or stock a cupboard before we come. Apart from three everyday items, covered below, there’s nothing to buy.

Prefer Your Own Products? We’ll Use Them

Some clients have a product they love. Others have someone at home with allergies. Either way, if you’d rather we use your products, we will. Just tell us when you book, so the team knows before they arrive.

The 3 Things to Have Ready

We ask every client to keep three things in the house for the team:

1. Paper towels.
2. Swiffer duster refills. On regular visits, the team dusts furniture and baseboards with a Swiffer duster.
3. Trash bags. The team empties your trash cans and puts in fresh liners on every visit.

That’s the whole list. If you’re running low on any of them, add them to your shopping before the first visit.

A Few Things That Help on the Day

Leave clean linens out if you’d like fresh sheets. The team makes the beds, and changes the linens when clean ones are left out for them.

Clear away anything you’d rather handle yourself. If your first visit is a deep cleaning, it’s strictly cleaning: organizing or rearranging belongings isn’t part of it. Putting away papers, laundry and anything you’d like to sort yourself lets the team spend the visit on cleaning.

Ask for extras before the day. Inside the oven, inside the refrigerator and washing blinds are add-ons. Request them ahead of time so they’re included in your quote and in the time we plan for your visit.

How Long the Visit Takes

Plan for a few hours. A General Clean, our recurring plan, averages 4 to 5 hours with two technicians. Our whole-home deep cleaning, Top to Bottom Deluxe, averages 6 to 8 hours, and a Focus Deep Cleaning 5 to 6. The size and condition of your home can make any visit shorter or longer. On a deep cleaning, if your home needs extra time to meet our standard, we tell you first.

Should Your First Visit Be a Deep Cleaning?

When a home hasn’t had a professional clean in a while, we suggest a deep cleaning first, followed by recurring house cleaning. The deep cleaning resets the whole home, and the regular visits keep it there. A client in Simsbury described it in her review:

“We recently contacted Family Cleaners for a bi-weekly cleaning of our home. They encouraged us to start with an initial deep clean, which we just had yesterday. The ladies did a phenomenal job cleaning our home.”

Michelle S., Simsbury, Google review

More reviews from our clients are on Google.

Before we quote, we’ll ask you to choose the cleaning assessment code, from 1 to 10, that best matches your home today. That code helps us plan how many people to send and how much time to set aside.

Who Comes to Your Home

Letting a new team into your home is a big step. Each person we send has passed a background check, and our company is licensed, bonded and insured. We’ve been cleaning homes since 2012, from our office in West Hartford.

Payment and Changes

There’s no contract to sign. Payment is due the day we clean, and any major credit card works, including American Express, Discover, Mastercard and Visa. If you need to cancel or move your first cleaning, please give us seven days’ notice.

About Photos of Your Home

Your quote includes a section where you can tell us you’d rather we didn’t take photos of your home. If you say no, we don’t take any. If you don’t mind photos, our contract explains that the ones we take may appear on our website and social media.

Quick Answers

Do I need to buy cleaning supplies before my first cleaning? No. Our team brings its own products and equipment. All we ask is that you have paper towels, Swiffer duster refills and trash bags in the house.

Can I ask you not to take photos of my home? Yes. Say so in the photo section of your quote, and no photos will be taken.

Book Your First Cleaning

Tell us about your home and what you’d like done, and we’ll take care of the rest. Quotes are free.

Request your free quote

About the author: Caroline Compiani, owner of Family Cleaners. Caroline founded Family Cleaners together with her mother, who already had a cleaning business, and carried the project forward. Family Cleaners has been cleaning homes since 2012 from its office in West Hartford.