- Surfaces dusted and wiped
- Kitchen — counters, stovetop, sink
- Bathroom — toilet, tub/shower, sink
- Floors — vacuumed and mopped
- Mirrors and accessible glass
- Inside oven or refrigerator
- Baseboards scrubbed
- Window tracks
- Inside cabinets
- Grout lines scrubbed
- All standard clean items
- Inside oven — racks, bottom, door
- Inside refrigerator — shelves, seals
- Baseboards — scrubbed, not wiped
- Window tracks and sills
- Inside all cabinets
- Grout lines scrubbed
- Light fixtures and ceiling fans
- Behind and under appliances
- Shower caulk and door tracks
The Core Difference
A standard clean is maintenance. It assumes you're starting from a clean baseline and keeping it that way. The cleaner works through a predictable checklist efficiently — dusting, wiping, mopping — and typically takes 2–3 hours for a 1BR.
A deep clean is a reset. It addresses all the accumulation that maintenance cleaning skips: the inside of the oven that hasn't been touched in months, the grout lines in the bathroom, the baseboards along the hallway floor, the tracks in every window. Deep cleans take 4–6 hours for a 1BR and cost roughly $80 more.
When You Need a Deep Clean
When Standard Cleaning Is Enough
If your apartment is regularly maintained — you clean up after yourself, it gets a standard clean every 2–4 weeks, and there's no recent renovation or major buildup — standard cleaning is what you need. It's the right ongoing maintenance for a clean home.
The tell: if a cleaner walks in and can complete their checklist without running into anything that requires extra product, soaking time, or repeated scrubbing, that's a standard clean job. If they encounter calcified soap scum, blackened oven racks, or baseboards with years of accumulation — that's deep clean territory.
Brooklyn-Specific Considerations
Brooklyn's pre-war housing stock means more surfaces that accumulate buildup over time: original hardwood baseboards, older tile grout, cast-iron radiators, windows that open onto street-level dust. For apartments in buildings from the 1920s–1940s — common across Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights, and Cobble Hill — deep cleans tend to be more impactful than they are in newer construction.
If you're in Williamsburg or DUMBO in a converted loft with concrete floors and exposed brick, the dusting requirements are different — concrete and brick hold dust in ways smooth surfaces don't. That also changes what a deep clean prioritizes.