Cleaning in Superior, AZ, at the Far Edge of Our Map

The homes in Superior are early 1900s mining-town houses, and they are unlike anything in the Valley subdivisions. Small footprints, thick walls, old wood floors and trim, add-ons from several decades, windows that were never tight, and a hundred years of the dust that blows off the hills and the old mine ground. Cleaning one is careful, thorough work, and the first visit is nearly always a deep clean: high dusting, sills and ledges, blinds, the ceiling fans, oven and fridge insides, the range hood, window tracks, walls spot-cleaned, every bathroom descaled, floors done last. We ask about old finishes on the walk-through and keep water off the surfaces that do not want it.

After that first reset, some households keep us on a monthly visit. Most of the Superior calls, honestly, are one-time: a deep clean before family comes, a clean-out after a longtime owner moves, a reset on a house that was closed up for the summer.

Superior houses change hands in a particular way. Some are bought by people from the Valley wanting a weekend place in the hills, some are rentals for people working at Resolution Copper or the arboretum, and some are family houses being sold after decades. A move-out clean on an empty house gets it ready for the next person or the listing: the insides of cabinets and drawers, the oven and the fridge, the bathrooms, the blinds and fixtures, and the floors on the way out. For an out-of-town owner, we work from a lockbox by agreement and let you know by text or email once the job is done.

Superior's commercial life runs along the historic downtown on Main Street: shops, a cafe or restaurant, small offices, a church, the town's own buildings, and the visitor traffic that Boyce Thompson Arboretum, 392 acres founded in 1924, brings through on weekends. For a storefront, retail store cleaning means the sales floor, the glass, the restroom and the back room on a weekly or before-opening schedule. For a church, the sanctuary, fellowship hall and restrooms get reset between services, as laid out on the church cleaning page. Scope in writing, one point of contact, the owner on the phone.

Superior gets the monsoon like the rest of the state, June 15 to September 30, but the dust here comes off the hills and the mine ground as much as from the desert floor, and the old houses take it in through every gap. After a storm we start with sills, tracks, blinds, fans and floors. The rest of the year brings hard water scale on glass and fixtures, which we descale, spring pollen, and the summer months when a house that has no reason to open its windows collects whatever is in the air. We use eco-friendly cleaning practices everywhere, and an old, closed house is where it counts.