House cleaning in Leslieville

What the homes are like here

Leslieville grew up around George Leslie's Toronto Nurseries from the 1850s and filled in as a working-class neighbourhood between roughly 1885 and 1915, housing people who worked the brickyards, tanneries and factories along the Don and the eastern industrial corridor.

The dominant house is a semi-detached or row house from that period, and the number that explains everything about cleaning here is the width: most are 15 to 20 feet wide, on lots 80 to 100 feet deep. Two to two and a half storeys, brick front, bay window, small rear yard. South of Queen you find the oldest stock, including Ontario cottages and Second Empire rows.

Layered on top is two decades of heavy renovation. A large share of these houses now have a new rear addition or a gutted ground floor meeting entirely original material upstairs, which means one house can need three different approaches on three floors.

What we actually deal with in Leslieville

Fifteen to twenty feet wide, with the staircase eating a chunk of that, means the working space is genuinely tight. Furniture cannot be moved far because there is nowhere to move it to, corners are awkward, and a full-size vacuum does not turn in the upstairs hall. The work is slower than the floor area implies, which is the honest reason we quote from bedrooms and bathrooms.

The staircases are steep, narrow and frequently original, with winders at the turn rather than a landing. Carrying equipment up them is the single biggest time cost in a house like this, and the treads themselves are a detail job because the dust collects in the angle at the back of each step.

Renovation is constant here, and renovation dust does not behave like household dust. It is fine, it is everywhere, and it keeps resettling for days after the trades have packed up because it is sitting on ledges and in cavities you cannot see. It is cleaned in passes rather than once, with HEPA filtration, and it is genuinely a different service from a regular clean.

Half-renovated houses are their own problem. New engineered floors downstairs and original softwood upstairs need different treatment on the same visit, and the boundary is not always obvious. Tell us what is new and what is original and we will treat them accordingly.

This is family territory, and that changes the priorities rather than the standard. High chairs, floors that get eaten off, and a single bathroom shared by four people move up the list. Fragrance-free products are available at no extra cost in homes with small children, and it goes on the file so it does not have to be asked for twice.

Post-renovation dust, and why one clean is never enough

Drywall dust is around ten microns and lighter than household dust, so it stays airborne for hours and travels through a house into rooms the trades never entered. It settles on every horizontal surface, and then it settles again the moment anyone walks through.

That is why post-renovation work is done in passes. The first pass takes the bulk off every surface top to bottom. The second, ideally a day or more later, takes what has resettled out of the air in the meantime. Skipping the second pass is the reason people feel a renovation clean did not work.

It also has to be HEPA filtered. A standard vacuum with a paper bag passes fine drywall dust straight through the motor and back into the room, which redistributes it rather than removing it, and does the vacuum no favours either.

The other rule is timing: book it after the last trade has finished. One more session of sanding undoes the entire job. Details are on the post-renovation cleaning page.

Original softwood floors upstairs

The upper floors of houses from this era are usually softwood, often pine, and often finished with something that predates polyurethane. Wax, shellac and old varnish all react badly to water, and pine is soft enough that grit underfoot acts like sandpaper.

The practical approach is to vacuum thoroughly first so nothing abrasive is being dragged around, then damp-mop with a barely wet microfibre and a neutral cleaner, and never leave standing water at a board seam. Water sitting in a gap swells the board edge and raises it, and on old pine that is permanent.

Steam mops are the thing to avoid entirely on these floors. They force hot moisture into the seams and through any gap in the finish, and on an old softwood floor with an aged finish the result is cloudy, lifted and not reversible without sanding.

Near Queen East, Greenwood Park, Jimmie Simpson Park, Gerrard Street East.