We vacuum dust before anything gets wet

Drywall dust ends up in every room

A remodel leaves behind more than the mess you can see. Sanding drywall mud makes a powder fine enough to ride the air through the whole house. It lands on every flat surface, inside the cabinets, on top of the ceiling fan blades and down in the window tracks. It also works into the weave of your sofa and the cushions of any chair left in the house. Our job is getting all of that out, including the dust you will not notice for another week.

We work in the same order on every job. Dry dust comes off first, with a vacuum on the ceilings, walls, vents, trim and floors, starting high and working down. That way nothing falls onto a surface we already cleaned. Then the hard surfaces get wiped: cabinets inside and out, counters, doors, light switches and window sills. Fabric comes last. Upholstered furniture and car seats get shampooed and steam cleaned once the room around them is already clean.

When it is done right, you can run a dark cloth along a shelf and it comes back clean. The floor does not feel gritty under bare feet. Sitting down on the couch does not raise a little gray puff from the cushion. Missed dust usually shows up a week or so later. The air conditioning or the heat kicks on and blows it out of the vents, across rooms you thought were finished.

• Dry vacuuming before any wet cleaning
• Ceilings, walls, vents and trim dusted top down
• Cabinets and drawers wiped inside and out
• Window glass, sills and tracks cleaned
• Fabric furniture and car seats shampooed and steamed

Water turns drywall dust into paste

The most common mistake after a remodel is grabbing a wet rag first. Dust from drywall mud turns back into a paste the moment it gets wet. Wipe a dusty counter with a damp cloth and you spread a thin film that dries into a white haze. Mop a floor that was never vacuumed and the dust packs into the grout lines and board seams, where it turns gray and stays.

Fabric has the same problem, and it is harder to fix. Shampoo a sofa while dust is still sitting in the weave, and the water carries that dust deeper into the cushion. As the fabric dries, the dirt can wick back up to the surface and leave a darker patch than you started with. So we vacuum upholstery slowly, along every seam and under every cushion, before any shampoo touches it.

The step people skip most often is the air vents. While the work is going on, the system pulls dust into the return grilles, and it sits on every vent cover in the house. If those are left alone, the first hot afternoon your air runs hard, it blows fresh dust across rooms that were clean the day before. We vacuum and wipe every vent cover and return grille before the floors get done.

Older Nashville homes leave gritty plaster dust

A lot of the remodeling around Nashville happens inside older houses. Think of the craftsman bungalows in East Nashville or the big older homes in Belle Meade. Many were built with plaster walls on wood lath. Tearing out plaster makes a gritty dust that is heavier than drywall dust and full of sand. It scratches floors when people walk on it, and it settles into the gaps between old oak boards.

Newer construction brings its own mess. Across Nashville, older lots keep getting split and rebuilt as tall, narrow homes. Around Franklin and Brentwood, whole neighborhoods of new houses go up at once. A brand new house has drywall dust in every closet, sawdust on the shelves and a gray film on the windows. Nobody has lived in it yet, so not one surface has been wiped even once.

Then there is the clay. Much of the soil in Middle Tennessee is thick red clay, and during a build it rides in on boots and grinds into the carpet. It also ends up on any seat someone used in work clothes. Scrubbing red clay while it is still wet pushes it deeper into the fibers. It comes out better once it dries, when most of it can be vacuumed up before the shampoo goes on.

Shampooed fabric dries slowly in humid weather

Shampooing puts water into fabric, and in a Nashville summer the air is already full of it. A cushion that dries by dinner in a dry month can stay damp much longer in July. Fabric that stays damp too long starts to smell musty, which is the last thing you want in a house you just finished. So after the steam and shampoo, we pull out as much water as we can and set the cushions up so air can reach them.

You can help it along after we leave. Run the air conditioning and a ceiling fan in that room. Keep people and pets off the cushions until they feel dry to the touch. In the spring, when pollen coats every car in Nashville, keep the windows closed while the fabric dries. Damp upholstery grabs pollen out of the air and holds on to it, and then you are cleaning it twice.

Car seats are fabric too, and a remodel gets to them more than people expect. Say your car sat in the garage while tile and drywall were cut in there. Now the dust is in the vents, on the dash and down in the seats. We vacuum the interior first and shampoo the seats after, the same order we use in the house. As Iris Dodson wrote about her van: "They even removed stains I thought were permanent."