Pet-Friendly Cleaning Notes to Share Before Booking

Five minutes of notes decide how the visit goes

You are about to leave someone alone in your house with a dog who loses his mind at the vacuum and a cat who bolts for the back door every time it opens. What that cleaner knows before walking in is the difference between a normal visit and a phone call you take in the parking lot at work.

Almost all of it fits in a short note sent with the booking. Below is what we ask when we set up a pet household around Lake Stevens, Marysville, Monroe and Bothell. None of it is a test. It is scheduling information that changes how long the visit takes.

Introduce each animal, including where they will be

Name, species, rough size and age, and one honest line about temperament. A seventy pound dog who barks for two minutes and then wants his ears scratched is a different plan from a small dog who guards the hallway. Tell us if an animal has ever snapped at a stranger. That is not a judgment; it tells us to work with a door between us.

Vacuums deserve their own sentence. Plenty of dogs are friendly with people and genuinely reactive to a running upright, and a deaf senior dog may sleep through the visit until someone touches him. Cats split into two types: the ones who vanish under the bed, and the ones who supervise, walk across wet floors and sit on the mop bucket.

Then say where each one will be. Crated, shut in a bedroom with a note on the door, loose, in the yard, or at daycare. All workable. Finding out at the door is not.

Access notes, so nobody lets the dog out

The riskiest ninety seconds of any visit is arrival, when the door is open and supplies are coming in. That is the moment a cat who has never been outside decides to try it. Tell us which entrance to use, whether a storm door latches on its own, where the key sits, and the alarm code plus who to call if it trips.

Yards need the same treatment. Say whether the gate self-closes or swings open in a south wind, whether the fence has a gap a small dog already found, and whether the dog door should be blocked while floors dry.

One standing rule worth confirming: unless your notes say otherwise, we do not put animals out, bring them in, or move them between rooms.

Coat type and shedding season set the time budget

Hair volume is not one thing. Double-coated breeds, huskies, shepherds, goldens, corgis, blow coat twice a year, and during those weeks a house that normally takes two hours honestly takes closer to three. Filters clog and every room needs a second pass.

Short bristly coats fool people. A lab, a beagle or a pit mix sheds less by weight than a husky, but those stiff quarter-inch hairs weave into upholstery and low-pile carpet and resist a vacuum in a way long hair does not. Lifting them takes a rubber-edged tool or a carpet rake, not more suction. Long-haired cats and doodles bring the opposite problem: fine undercoat and dander that settles on fabric rather than the floor.

Where the hair actually collects

Hair does not stay where the animal sleeps. It moves with airflow and settles at edges, which is why a room can look fine and still shed handfuls when you move a couch. The reservoirs, in rough order of volume:

• Under beds and behind sofas, by a wide margin the biggest two
• The gap where baseboard meets flooring, and the shoe molding above it
• Upholstery seams and the crease where a cushion meets the seat back
• Stair treads at the riser junction, where a vacuum head cannot sit flat
• HVAC return grilles, floor registers and the furnace filter itself
• The bottom few inches of curtains and the toe kick under cabinets

The return vent surprises people. If hair reappears the day after a thorough cleaning, the system is often recirculating it through a loaded filter. Changing that filter more often in shedding season does more than another vacuum pass.

Litter boxes, crates and cages: what is in and what is out

Be direct about this and there is no awkwardness later. Normally in scope: vacuuming litter scatter, wiping the tracking mat and the outside of the box, mopping the floor around and behind it, wiping a crate tray that has been emptied, and carrying bagged waste to your outdoor bin.

Normally out of scope: scooping, changing litter, handling loose waste, cleaning cages with animals inside, and anything involving an aquarium. Part of that is cross-contamination; part is that litter box equipment should not touch anything else in the house.

The most useful thing you can do before a visit is scoop the boxes that morning. Two minutes, and it changes how the house smells all day. Say where the boxes live, especially the one behind the laundry room door.

Odour is one job, staining is a different one

These get treated as one request and they are not. Surface odour from a dog bed, a damp crate pad or a litter corner responds well to routine cleaning and an enzyme product left wet long enough to break down the residue.

Urine that soaked through carpet into the pad is a different trade. Surface work refreshes the room for a day and the smell returns with humidity. Real correction means extraction, sealing, or replacing pad and sometimes subfloor.

Staining is its own question. Old urine can chemically alter carpet dye, and earlier attempts with peroxide sometimes leave a lightened patch that is now permanent. Cat urine on a wool rug can shift the fiber colour outright. We will tell you before we start which spots we expect to improve and which look set, because nobody can promise a stain will lift from a photo.

Products, sensitivities and an honest word about pet safe

There is no single certification that makes a cleaning product pet safe, and any company claiming their line is universally approved is overselling. What protects animals is dilution to the label rate, rinsing, ventilation, and keeping them off treated surfaces until dry.

A few sensitivities are worth flagging. Veterinarians generally caution against phenol-based cleaners, the strong pine-scented type, in homes with cats. Birds have famously delicate airways and do best in a closed room away from aerosols. Some reptile and fish tanks depend on an outlet that must not be unplugged for a vacuum, so name it.

If anyone in the household reacts to fragrance, ask for a fragrance-free approach. We would rather adjust products than have you discover the problem after we leave. What we use is on our services page.

Muddy paws from November through April

Around here a dog spends half the year coming in from a lawn that has not been dry since October. It is not only mud. It is fine grit suspended in that mud, abrasive enough to dull a hardwood finish and wear carpet along the path a dog walks, which is why the line from the back door to the couch goes grey first.

What helps is unglamorous. A towel on a hook at the door the dog uses. A washable low-pile runner instead of a decorative mat, long enough that paws actually cross it. Trimming the fur between the paw pads, which holds more mud than the paw does. Wiping the wall at dog shoulder height, where they shove through and leave a smear nobody looks at. If moss has taken the back steps, that green comes inside on paws too.

We can weight a winter visit toward entries and the main traffic path. We cannot make it stay that way until spring, and any cleaner who says otherwise has not worked a Puget Sound winter.

The note you can copy and send with your booking

Send this once and we keep it on file. Nine lines is plenty:

1. Each animal by name, species, size and temperament
2. How each reacts to a running vacuum
3. Where each will be: crated, in a room, loose, outside, away
4. Door and gate risk, and which entrance to use
5. Key, lockbox, garage and alarm codes, plus who to call
6. Where litter boxes and crates are, and whether they were scooped
7. Product sensitivities and any outlet that must stay plugged in
8. Rooms to skip entirely
9. Confirmation that animals should not be let out or moved

Anything that changes between visits, a new foster or a dog recovering from surgery, is worth a text before we arrive. To book a first visit, call (425) 377-3649 or send your notes through the quote form. Check service areas, and find more guides on our blog.