Window Cleaningin Covington

Window cleaning, in our own words

Window Cleaning: We offer both inside/outside windows or outside only

We will clean any exterior or interior window, even those hard-to-reach ones. Prices are charged per pane. Windows typically have two panes: a stationary pane and a sliding pane.

What a pane means for your quote

Per pane pricing sounds like fine print until you look at your own windows. Most sliders in a Northwest home hold two panes in one opening: a fixed piece of glass and a piece that slides. A picture window is one large pane. A window with a decorative grid behind a single sheet of glass is still one pane, because it is still one piece of glass.

Counting that way ties the price to the glass we actually clean instead of a guess based on the size of the house. It also means you get to choose. If the front of the house is what you care about, we can do the front. If the kitchen and the living room are the rooms you sit in, start there. Nothing about this has to be all or nothing.

Inside and out, or outside only

Outside only is what most homes need most of the time. Exterior glass takes the weather: rain, road dust, pollen, needle dust off the firs and cedars, and the grit that blows off a dry driveway in summer. That is where the film builds up, and it is the side you cannot reach with a paper towel.

Inside and out is the right call when the interior glass has picked up its own layer. Cooking film in the kitchen. Nose prints at the slider where the dog watches the yard. Overspray near a sink. The fine dust that settles through a winter of closed windows. If you are unsure, stand inside on a bright day and look across the glass at an angle rather than straight through it. Interior film only shows in that raking light.

Why windows here do not stay clean on their own

Rain is not clean water by the time it lands on your window. It gathers dust on the way down, runs over the roof and across the face of the gutter, and carries whatever is sitting up there onto the glass below. The water evaporates. The dirt does not. That is why a window can look worse two days after a storm than it did during it, and we go through the whole process in why your windows look dirty again after a cleaning.

Two things make it sharper on a South Sound home. Conifers shed fine needle dust all year, not only in the fall, and that dust is light enough to ride the wind onto glass on every side of the house. And any window under a dirty gutter line gets a stripe of runoff every time it rains. That is one reason window cleaning and gutter cleaning belong on the same visit.

The hard to reach windows

Every house has a few. Glass over a stairwell. A second story window above a flower bed with no footing for a ladder. A gable window at the peak. A slider tucked behind a deck rail. These are the windows that stay dirty for years, because they are exactly the ones a homeowner cannot safely get to with a bucket and a squeegee.

They are part of this job. Reaching them is a matter of picking the right approach for the spot: ladder footing where the ground supports it, a pole from below where it does not, and a plan for the openings that need both. What does not happen is a ladder forced into a place that will not hold it. If a window cannot be reached safely at your home, we will tell you instead of taking a chance on your landscaping or on somebody's back.

Screens, and what they do to the glass

A wipe down of the screens comes with a window cleaning. That takes the loose surface dust off, and it helps.

A screen holds more than loose dust, though. The mesh traps pollen, fir dust and road grit inside the weave, and the frame channel collects cobwebs and grit in the corners where a rag never reaches. The first hard rain pushes that film out of the mesh and straight down onto the glass you just had cleaned. If your windows go cloudy unusually fast, the screens are usually the reason. The screen clean upgrade takes the screens out, cleans them on our screen cleaning stand and puts them back, and it is worth adding while they are coming out anyway.

Getting ready for the visit

Nothing complicated:

• Move breakables off the sills of any window being cleaned inside.
• Clear a path around the outside of the house, especially where planters, furniture or hoses sit under a window.
• Unlock gates and let us know about a dog in the yard.
• Point out any window that will not open or has a broken latch so nobody forces it.
• Tell us about a film, a tint or a cracked pane so we can work around it.

Window cleaning across the South Sound

We clean windows for homes in Covington and across South King County, Pierce County and Thurston County, including Kent, Renton, Maple Valley, Auburn, Federal Way, Puyallup, Sammamish, Issaquah and Olympia. The full list is on our service areas page. We are a residential only company, so your house is the job.

Plenty of homeowners put the glass on the same rotation as the rest of the exterior. Our post on a season by season rhythm for South Sound homes lays out what tends to pair with what. If you would rather have the whole outside handled in one go, window cleaning sits naturally alongside gutter cleaning and a soft wash of the siding.

Book a window cleaning online or get in touch and tell us roughly how many windows you have and whether you want inside and out or outside only.