House Cleaner Recommendation / Update On Travel

I want to give a big “thumbs up” to Pro Window & Carpet Cleaning of Mountain View, California (1-888-470-6623). A real-estate agent friend who uses them to give the houses he lists a thorough cleaning recommended them to clean my long-vacant house (full of dust and spiders and cooties).

I met the foreman at my place at 8:00 this morning, and he gave an estimate for cleaning all the floors, counter and furniture surfaces, wiping down the doors and baseboards and moldings, cleaning air vents, and a full workup of the bathrooms and the fridge. For all but one room (which was too full of stuff to bother with) of the 2,500 sq. ft. house, it came to $245, which seemed reasonable. I added a $60 pressure-washing of one of the two tile patios, so Anthony could go out and play without getting to grimy.

An hour later the foreman came back with three guys and went to work. In the mean time, I'd realized just how incredibly dirty the windows and screens were, so I asked them to do that, too. There are something like 35(!) windows, counting the skylights, I think, so that just about doubled the price to a total of $585. The three guys worked pretty solidly from 9:30ish until maybe 4:00pm, with the foreman doing the power washing outside.

They did an excellent job, and really transformed the house into something livable. As a bonus, they did the second patio and the garage gratis.

The only snag was that I didn't know that they don't move furniture unless asked, such as to clean the floor under a sofa. When I asked them to clean under the sofa and some other large furniture, they did without hesitation (but did let me know that they normally don't unless asked, particularly with hardwood floors, since some owners don't like the furniture moved).


An update from yesterday's post: I never got to sleep again after writing that post, so I was half a zombie all day today. The cable guys from Comcast showed up at 11am with a cablemodem and hooked up my service at the pole. I drove over to the hotel where Fumie and Anthony were still waiting and called Comcast to enable my router, only to find that I needed its MAC address. So, I drove the whole mile or two back to get it, and after another trip to the hotel I had connectivity at home.

Soon after that, I hooked up my Vonage VoIP modem and I had phone service in my house, with the same phone number I've had since 1998. Vonage is cool.

Actually, I already had reasonable wireless connectivity at home, in one case via a WAP called “linksys” (one of my neighbors, I would guess), and one by MetroFi, citywide free WiFi supported by advertisements inserted at the top of web pages.

In the evening, we went back to San Jose airport to swap the huge boat for a more reasonably sized vehicle. They even credited me for the gas and charged only on what I used (albeit at their ridiculous $6.50/gallon rate, but I'd not used much at all so it amount to much).

We got a Nissan Murano mid-sized SUV. It seems quite nice, but the one we got seemed to have some kind of disagreeable smell, at least to me. Fumie didn't notice it. After much discussion with the Hertz people (who, I must say, were very accommodating and understanding -- I was really starting to feel like a pest, but they were nothing but kind), we found another Murano and used that.

It had the same smell -- I guess it's the fabric smell. But as a little bonus, the new car came with Sirus satellite radio.

After finally getting out of there with the much-easier-to-drive Murano, we headed over to the Nijiya Japanese Market in Mountain View to stock up on some groceries and stuff for dinner. With good food in my tummy, hopefully I'll be able to sleep tonight.


All 2 comments so far, oldest first...

Jeffrey!

good to hear that you are back in the bay area. We should meet!!

-ravi

— comment by Ravi D on July 20th, 2006 at 6:42am JST (17 years, 8 months ago) comment permalink

Have you ever gone down to the Kinokuniya and Mitsuya store down in San Jose/Santa Clara? Kumiko and I always used to go to that shopping center to get our books and groceries. There’s also a few good places in San Mateo and of course Japan town in both San Jose off 7th St. and in San Francisco off of, what, Post St. I think it was. And of course the Japanese programs on TV Saturday and Sunday nights. Enjoy it man!

— comment by Ben on July 26th, 2006 at 10:23pm JST (17 years, 8 months ago) comment permalink
Leave a comment...


All comments are invisible to others until Jeffrey approves them.

Please mention what part of the world you're writing from, if you don't mind. It's always interesting to see where people are visiting from.

IMPORTANT:I'm mostly retired, so I don't check comments often anymore, sorry.


You can use basic HTML; be sure to close tags properly.

Subscribe without commenting