Post-Construction Cleaning

Construction dust is not household dust

Drywall dust is fine enough to pass through a standard filter and heavy enough to settle back down for days after you think you have finished. Sawdust carries resin. Grout haze bonds to tile. None of it responds to the method that cleans a lived-in house, and a crew that treats it as if it does will hand over a property that looks clean at four o’clock and dusty again the next morning.

The order matters as much as the products: top down, in stages, with settling time built in rather than one pass and a handover.

What gets missed on a bad handover

Sticker residue on windows and appliances. Paint flecks on hinges, switch plates and door tracks. The inside of cabinets and drawers, which nobody opens until they are being filled. Vents, which have been open the whole build. Grout haze that only shows once the light changes.

Those are the items an owner or a tenant notices in the first week, and they are the ones that make a beautiful build feel unfinished.

Working around the trades

The clean rarely gets a clear run. There is usually a punch list still moving, a floor going in late, or an inspection to pass, and the useful contractor is the one who works to the actual schedule rather than the one on paper. We would rather split it into a rough clean and a final than do one pass at the wrong moment and have it undone behind us.

Related work

Post-construction is often the last stage of a restoration job rather than a new build: the property is repaired, and then it has to be made habitable before pack-back can happen. It also runs alongside fire mitigation cleaning, which is a different problem again. For scheduled work after handover, see commercial and residential cleaning, and for empty properties between occupants see move-out and move-in cleans.