What Actually Happens During a Window Cleaning

A window cleaning runs in a set order. The exterior glass goes first, cleaned from the ground with purified water through a pole, and it is left wet to dry on its own. Then the interiors, which are hand work. Screens come out and go back, frames and sills get wiped, tracks get cleared, and the job ends with a walk around the house to look at it together. On a normal Twin Cities house that is a couple of hours.

Outside first, and why the order matters

The exterior is the dirty half and the wet half. Doing it first means the glass has an hour or two to dry while the inside work is going on, so anything that needs a second pass gets caught before the van leaves. It also keeps wet gear from being carried back through a house that was just finished.

If it is below freezing, the outside half does not happen at all. Water on glass in the cold is a problem, not a cleaning.

The exterior half is water, not soap

Exterior glass is cleaned with purified water fed up a pole that reaches up to 40 feet from the ground. The brush head on the end breaks the dirt loose and the rinse carries it off. Nothing is wiped and nothing is squeegeed outside.

That is the part people ask about. Purified water has had the minerals stripped out of it, so when it dries there is nothing left behind to dry into a spot. A tap water rinse would leave the spots. So the glass is supposed to look wet and streaky when the pole moves on. Look at it an hour later, not while it is dripping.

A pole handles almost everything on a house this size, including second story glass and the gable windows nobody has reached in years. The exceptions are worth naming: glass set deep in a recess, panes sitting above a lower roof or a sunroom, and anything with a deck railing in the way. Those get looked at and called out rather than guessed at.

Inside is all hand work

No pole comes indoors. Interior glass gets a towel on the sill, an applicator or a microfiber pad, then a squeegee or a dry pass, and the edges get detailed where the dirt collects.

Inside is slower per pane than outside, and it is where most of the clock goes. Not because the glass is harder, but because of everything around it: furniture that has to move a foot and come back, blinds that get raised and reset, sills that need wiping before anything touches the pane. This is also the half where the price moves most, since interior access is what varies house to house.

The number that drives the clock is panes, not windows. A single picture window is one pane and a divided double hung can be a dozen, so two houses with the same window count can be hours apart. Most houses land between two and four hours for inside and out. An older place in Macalester-Groveland or Highland Park with storms on every opening can run most of a day, because every storm panel has to come out and go back.

Screens, tracks and sills

Screens come out, get cleaned, and go back into the openings they came from. That last part is not fussiness. Screens in the same house are rarely interchangeable once a frame has settled, and a swapped pair will fight you for years.

Tracks get the grit cleared so the sash slides again, and the sills get wiped rather than left ringed with dirt. If a track has not been touched in a decade it is real time, so it is worth mentioning when you book rather than at the door. The full track and sill method is written up separately if you would rather do that part yourself.

The end of the job, and the one thing cleaning cannot fix

At the end we walk the house with you and look at the glass. If something is not right it gets redone, which is what the Gleam Guarantee means in practice. There is no payment until the work is finished.

The honest exception: if a pane looks hazy from both sides and the haze does not move, that is usually a failed seal between the panes, and no cleaning reaches it. Better to hear that during a walkthrough than to pay someone to try twice.

Nothing on your end is required beyond fifteen minutes of clearing, and there is a short guide to prepping for a visit if you want the list.

Want a Gleam Team pro to handle it?

Gleam Team cleans windows across St. Paul, Minneapolis and the metro, roughly 25 miles out, starting at $99. Get a free quote or book a visit.