How to Clean High Interior Windows Over a Stairwell

High interior windows are the ones that get skipped. The tall pane over a stair landing, the wall of glass in a two story great room, the transom above a front door. None of them are hard to clean once you can reach them. Reaching them is the whole problem, and the answer most people try first, a ladder on the stairs, is the one to rule out.

Why a ladder on the stairs is the wrong answer

A stepladder is built to stand with four feet on one level surface. A stair landing offers treads at different heights and a rounded nosing on each one, often under carpet. You can shift it until it feels solid and still have one foot on a rounded edge carrying most of your weight.

What is underneath matters too. Outside, a bad step puts you in the grass. Inside it puts you onto oak, tile or a railing, and the fall usually starts with a reach rather than a slip, because the glass is farther away than it looked. A reasonable rule: if you cannot reach the pane with both feet level on a floor and no leaning, do it from the ground with a pole or hand it over.

What is actually on high interior glass

The top of a tall window is not carrying the same dirt as the rest of the house. No rain, no road spray, no sprinkler water, no spider webs. What collects up there is household dust and a thin greasy film, both arriving on rising warm air, which is why the upper third is usually the worst part of the pane.

A Minnesota winter is the hard season for that film, because the house stays shut for months and cooking and furnace air put oil into air with nowhere to go. More on it in the piece on film on the inside of your windows.

The practical part: dust is dry, and wetting it first turns a short job into a long smeary one. Lift it off dry before any water touches the glass. It also means high interior glass needs doing far less often than windows at hand height. Once a year is usually plenty.

The pole setup that works

You want a light extension pole and two heads for it, a flat washing pad and a squeegee. A painter style pole is light enough to hold overhead.

• A dry pass first. A microfiber duster or dry flat pad on the pole, top to bottom, to take the loose dust off before anything gets wet.
• A damp pad, never a wet one. Wring it until it stops dripping when you hold it overhead. Water that runs down a pole ends up on the floor.
• A squeegee with soft rubber, pulled one direction and tilted so the water runs toward one side of the frame instead of straight down the wall.
• Top down, in overlapping strips, wiping the rubber on a towel between strokes so you are not dragging the last strip back across the glass.
• A towel wrapped on the pole to finish, to take the last bead of water off the bottom edge before it runs onto the trim.

The method is no different from cleaning any window well, just carried out at the end of a stick. What a pole cannot fix is a bad angle. If the pane sits behind a stair rail, you end up working across the glass instead of along it, and no technique makes that come out clean.

Everything below the window is part of the job

Before the pole comes out, deal with what is underneath. One towel on a landing is not coverage. A drop on a stair tread is both a water mark and a slick spot.

Blinds, shades and anything on a curtain rod come down or get pushed clear first. Working a pole around a half open blind is how a slat gets snapped or the pole end goes into the glass. Watch the wall under the sill, because flat paint takes a water mark and keeps it, and keep the bucket off the stairs.

When to hand it over

Some of this is not a Saturday project: a wall of glass going up two stories, or a window over a stair return with nowhere to stand square to it. Skylights are their own situation, and there is a separate guide to cleaning skylights inside and out.

Height is handled differently on each side of the glass. Outside, purified water through a water fed pole reaches up to forty feet from the ground, so no ladder goes up the siding. Inside, glass that high is reached with a pole as well, while windows at normal height are hand work on a Gleam Team window cleaning. Either way, say where your tall interior glass is when you ask rather than leaving it to be found on the day.

Housing stock here splits along a line. Older houses in St. Paul often have one tall window on the stair landing and nothing else high inside. Newer builds in Woodbury are the opposite, a whole wall of glass going up two stories.

If the high glass in your house has gone untouched for a few years, say where it is when you ask for a quote, or pick a time on the booking page.