Westboro is the only place we work where two houses side by side can
need completely different approaches.
Richmond Road has been here since 1818 and the area was annexed by
Ottawa in 1950, so a good share of the housing is genuinely old. Century
homes and post-war builds with original woodwork, plaster walls, settled
floors and radiators. Those get the slower, gentler treatment: painted
trim that’s been there ninety years doesn’t forgive a heavy hand.
Then since the early 2000s, teardowns and infill have gone up between
them. Those homes are the opposite problem. Three storeys on a narrow
lot, floor to ceiling glass, open riser stairs, skylights, and a lot of
matte black fixtures. Modern infills look low maintenance in photos and
are anything but. Matte black shows every fingerprint and water mark,
frameless glass shows every spot, and open stairs mean dust falls
through to whatever is underneath rather than collecting somewhere
convenient. These take longer than their square footage suggests, and
they need drying and buffing rather than wiping.
Practically that means we ask which one you’ve got before we quote. A
1925 semi off Churchill and a 2021 infill two doors down are not the
same job, and a company that prices them the same is going to be wrong
on one of them.
There are also a growing number of condos here, which are a
straightforward clean with building access to arrange in advance.
[One or two lines from your cleaners about Westboro specifically]
