UPDATE 10/9/15: Adding a star. Mike S. contacted me about my experience and offered to come back and re-clean. I actually really appreciated this gesture, because it showed that they actually do care about their customers. I did decline the offer since I actually spent quite some time further cleaning myself, but am more likely to try them out again since their customer service is great. I'll provide another update (and perhaps increase stars) if I go with their service again.
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ORIGINAL REVIEW:
Great and hard working cleaners -- but the final results were kind of underwhelming.
I recently moved into a new house in Santa Ana approx 2000 sq ft. I was quoted it would take about 4 hrs. At the time, our place was empty, because we had not yet moved our stuff. Our priorities were the bathrooms, floors, and kitchen.
Bathroom: Our master bath shower has the dirty mold in the grout which I pointed out. After cleaning it's still there. I went and bought some Mold Armor from Home Depot, and have been applying it on the mold -- it's going away. Kind of bummed that I had to do that.
Kitchen: We have a pretty big kitchen -- which I know can take lots of time. They explained how they will deep soak and get rid of the grease on the fronts of the cabinets and wipe/sanitize everything down. Well, they took a lot of time in there (at least half the time) and did not get to my very, very large refrigerator. That's okay, I figured, since I knew it was a pretty big kitchen -- I figured at least the cabinets, stove, and counters were cleaned. But as I started unpacking my kitchen, I'm finding all the areas that they missed, even though they said they cleaned it. They seemed to have missed a lot of the details -- I'm finding sides of cabinets that still have dirt/food debris from the previous owner, and also cabinet bottoms that have caked on food residue that seems untouched. I think they were running out of time and just did a quick wipe down -- kind of pointless. I would have rather had half of my kitchen cleaned really well than the entire thing only somewhat cleaned.
Floors: Half of the home is wood, and half is a stone/textured tile. The wood cleaning was good, but the tile cleaning was just okay. They just seemed to mop it really quickly. We take off our shoes before we enter the home, but I noticed that when I walk around barefoot, the bottoms of my feet are still turning black with dirt - I'm assuming it's from the tile and not the wood cleaning, but I could be wrong. Perhaps they didn't have enough time to do thorough tile cleaning.
Other notes: The same day that they left, I had to also buy a Swiffer duster and refills (along with the Mold Armor for the shower grout). I found that there were still a lot of cobwebs in all the rooms with daddy-long leg spiders in them. Again, it would have been nice to have a few rooms completely free of dust and cobwebs instead of having them scattered throughout the entire house. Having to clean for a few additional hours AFTER just having your house professionally cleaned made me really stop and think "WHY AM I DOING THIS?" -- which is really frustrating.
They did not get to even touch my laundry room and only did the floors in our bedrooms.
I paid for 4.5 hrs, but they did not get to do the entire house. I called for a "deep cleaning" and I'm not sure if that's what they are really good at. If anything, I would trust them to probably do one thing -- ie. floors only, etc, so that they can focus on it and do it well.
What kind of sucks is that the rest of the experience is great -- from the initial inquiry, to scheduling the appointment, talking to the cleaners throughout, and final billing. I just wish that the results of the cleaning justified the money I paid.
Finally - just as a comparison, my sister-in-law also recently moved into a home just around the corner from us, but used a different cleaning company for their deep clean. They have an older home in much poorer condition than ours and approximately 200 extra square feet larger -- their cleaners spent 4 hrs and felt so much nicer. They said they moved really quickly and it turns out their rate was about 20% cheaper (Got It Maid). My original plan was to utilize them -- but they were booked already when I called. Dirt Busters was my second choice.
I plan to do cleaning at least once a quarter -- I might give Dirt Busters another chance, and will update my review if anything changes. But I'm leaning towards using another company. read more