House cleaning in King West

What the homes are like here

King Street West between Bathurst and Spadina was the garment trade, which is why it is still called the Fashion District, and the warehouses that made the clothes are now the most interesting housing on the strip. Massey Harris Lofts at 915 King West is the 1883 head office of the Massey Harris farm equipment company, designed by E.J. Lennox, who also did Old City Hall and Casa Loma; it was converted in 2003 into 45 units. The Worx at 436 Wellington West is a classic brick warehouse with large panelled windows holding 34 lofts.

Around and between those sit the new builds, mostly mid and high-rise condos completed from the early 2000s onward, heavily weighted to one bedroom and one-bedroom-plus-den layouts under about 700 square feet.

There is a third layer that gets forgotten: three-storey townhomes tucked onto the side streets behind the main drag, which are effectively narrow houses with stairs on every floor and no lift.

What we actually deal with in King West

King West has an unusually high share of rentals and short-term stays for a residential neighbourhood, which means a lot of the cleaning demand here is turnover and end-of-tenancy work rather than long-running recurring visits. Both are priced flat, and a move-out clean is a different scope from a regular one rather than the same thing done harder.

Because the units are small and the kitchen is almost always open to the living space, cooking grease travels much further than people expect. It is not confined to the backsplash. It lands on the wall behind the sofa, on the face of the television, on the ceiling above the stove, and on the top edge of every cabinet door. In a closed kitchen that does not happen.

The three-storey townhomes are deceptive. Two bedrooms spread over three floors plus a rooftop terrace means a great deal of stair work and a vacuum carried up and down repeatedly, which is why the price comes off bedrooms and bathrooms rather than floor area.

Parking and loading are genuinely difficult on this stretch. There is very little street parking, much of what exists is permit-only, and the buildings that do have visitor spots often require them booked. If your building has a visitor space or a loading bay that can be reserved, telling us when you book makes the visit run better.

Turnover cleaning between guests or tenants

A turnover is a different job from a maintenance clean, and the difference is not effort, it is scope. Nobody lives in the unit between the two states, so everything is fair game: inside the fridge and the microwave, inside cupboards and drawers if they have been emptied, under and behind furniture that a resident would normally have things on, and every surface reset to a neutral condition rather than tidied around.

The time pressure is the other difference. A same-day changeover has a hard deadline set by the next check-in, which means the sequence has to be planned rather than improvised, and linen and consumables have to be on site before anyone arrives.

If you are setting a cleaning fee for a short-term rental and want to know what the work actually costs to deliver, our guide to Airbnb cleaning fees in Toronto works through the numbers, and the turnover service page covers what is included.

Open kitchens and where the grease actually goes

In an open-plan unit the extraction is usually a recirculating hood with a charcoal filter, not a duct to outside. That means the airborne fat from cooking is not removed from the room, it is filtered for smell and then released back into the same air.

It condenses on whatever is coolest and nearest, which is rarely the backsplash. The top face of upper cabinets, the ceiling directly over the hob, the wall opposite the kitchen and the front of any electronics on that wall all pick up a thin varnish that is not visible until a cloth goes across it and comes away yellow.

Degreasing that needs an alkaline cleaner with real dwell time rather than a spray-and-wipe, and it needs to be done in the right order so grease is not spread rather than lifted. On a first visit to a unit that has been cooked in hard for a year or two, this is a deep clean item, and a standard clean holds it afterwards.

Near Stackt Market, Victoria Memorial Square, Wellington Place, Bathurst and King.