The work is the argument.

AllCleaner cleans carpets and mattresses, clears up after renovations, handles move-in and move-out cleans, and extracts, dries and restores properties after water damage. Residential and commercial, across Toronto, North York, Vaughan and the wider GTA, seven days a week. The emergency line is answered around the clock, because a burst pipe does not wait for Monday morning.

What follows is about the work rather than about us, because somebody deciding whether to unlock a door for a stranger wants to know what happens once it is open.

The difference between a good job and a quick one

On a carpet the difference is mostly patience and order. A quick job wets the top of the pile, pulls some of it back, and leaves the room damp. A proper job starts with a full dry vacuum pass, because loose grit turns into mud the second water touches it. Then pre-treatment on the traffic lanes and the spots, left to dwell while nothing appears to be happening. Then slow overlapping passes with heat and suction, then dry passes back over the same ground. You can see which one you got in the recovery tank, and you can see it again three weeks later, when a properly extracted carpet has not greyed over in the doorways.

After a renovation the order matters just as much. Construction dust is ground gypsum, sawdust and masonry fines, light enough to hang in the air for days, so a clean carried out while a trade is still cutting gets undone by Thursday. We work top down, in more than one pass, and we go back over surfaces that already looked clean the first time.

With water damage the first hour is worth more than the next six, because water climbs drywall and runs along joists, and by the second day the job has shifted from drying to replacement. That is why the line is answered at night.

What we will tell you is not coming out

Some marks are not soil. Paint, bleach and dye damage are permanent. A carpet with delaminated backing can come apart under extraction. Pet urine that has soaked through to the underlay is a sub-surface problem and is priced differently from a surface one. We say all of that before the machine comes off the van, not after.

This is not modesty. A cleaner who promises that every mark will lift has to account for it at the end of the day, and the usual account involves a more expensive service you apparently needed all along. Setting the expectation correctly and then being judged against it is a better way to work.

What it costs, and why there is a minimum

You get a firm price before any work starts. It is built from the size of the space, the service, and the condition the place is in, which is why we ask how many rooms there are, what the carpet is made of, and what happened. On arrival we walk the rooms, and that either confirms the figure or changes it before anybody plugs anything in.

The minimum service fee of $100 to $150 exists because the van, the water, the machine and the setup cost the same whether we clean one room or four. Saying that plainly seems better than quietly inflating the per-room rate until the arithmetic works.

Who comes to the door, and what happens when something goes wrong

Our cleaners are insured and background checked. Ask at booking and we will confirm both in writing, which is a fair thing to ask of anyone you are handing a key to. All equipment and solutions arrive with the crew, so there is nothing to buy and nothing to set out before we get there. The solutions are eco-friendly and safe around children and pets once surfaces are dry. If somebody in the house has a sensitivity, tell us and we will tell you exactly what is going on which surface.

Jobs do go wrong occasionally. A stain wicks back up out of the backing as the carpet dries. A basement takes longer to dry than we said it would. Something gets knocked while furniture is being moved. The answer is the same in each case: call us and we come back. Wicking gets re-treated, a slow room gets air movers left running, and anything we damage goes through our insurance rather than through an argument. We would much rather hear about it from you than read about it somewhere else.