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By Grant Ugarte, owner of Bright Oak Home Services in Raleigh, NC
After a recent deep clean, a Raleigh client wrote in their review that the kitchen and bathroom needed the most attention. That’s a normal thing to hear after a first deep clean. It’s also the part of a house that quotes tend to get wrong, because the price gets set before anyone has a clear picture of the job.
Full disclosure: I run Bright Oak Home Services, a locally owned company that does house cleaning in Raleigh and around the Triangle. The advice below applies to whoever you hire, though. Most people compare cleaning quotes by lining up two numbers and taking the smaller one, when the number only means something once you know what work it’s paying for.
What’s the difference between a standard clean and a deep clean?
A standard clean (some companies call it recurring or maintenance cleaning) is upkeep. It assumes the home is already in decent shape and keeps it there: kitchen surfaces, bathrooms, dusting, floors. Most people book it weekly, every other week or monthly.
A deep clean goes after buildup that a regular visit never gets to. Soap scum on the shower glass, grease around the stove, grime along the baseboards. If it’s been a few months, or it’s your first visit with a new company, I’d start with a deep clean. The regular visits after it go a lot smoother.
The trouble is that none of these names mean the same thing from one company to the next. One company’s standard clean includes wiping out the microwave and another charges extra for it. So when two quotes come in far apart, it usually isn’t that one company is gouging you. They’re quoting different amounts of work.
Ask to see the actual checklist
I mean the list the cleaner works from in your kitchen, broken out room by room. A paragraph on a website doesn’t count.
Once you have it, check the spots behind most “I thought that was included” conversations: inside the oven and fridge, baseboards, blinds, window sills, inside cabinets and drawers. Oven cleaning comes up in our own reviews often enough that Google lists it as one of the topics people mention, so I’d ask about it by name.
If something you care about isn’t on the list, plan on it not getting done. Cleaners follow the list, and that’s how it should work. It’s the one place where “clean” means the same thing to you and to the person holding the vacuum.
Move-outs and short notice
“Move out clean” is the phrase that shows up most in our reviews, more than anything else Google pulls out of them. It makes sense. An empty home lets the cleaner get inside every cabinet and appliance and behind where the couch used to be, and it’s also the clean with the most riding on it. If you’re renting, hold the company’s checklist up against whatever your landlord will look at during the walkthrough, before the last day.
A few of our reviews are tagged “last minute hiring,” too. Booking on short notice is fine. Just don’t let the scope conversation be the thing you skip because you’re in a hurry. On a move-out there may not be time for a second visit before the keys go back.
What should a cleaning quote include?
Before anyone comes to your house, I’d want these in writing:
- the type of clean and the room-by-room checklist behind it
- what costs extra, like the inside of the oven or fridge
- whether the cleaners are background-checked and the company is insured
- what happens if something gets missed, and how long you have to say so
- how rescheduling and cancelling work
The missed-spot answer tells you a lot. Every company misses something eventually, so what you really want to know is what happens next. Ours is short: tell us within three days and we come back and re-clean that spot at no charge. Another company’s policy can be different. It just needs to be specific enough to write down, because “just let us know” isn’t a policy.
And describe your home honestly when you ask for the quote. How long since the last real clean, whether you have pets, whether the shower has months of buildup. A quote is only as good as the information it’s built on. If a company asks you a lot of questions before it gives you a number, that’s usually a good sign.
Reading the reviews
We’re at 4.9 across more than 300 Google reviews, and I’d still tell you not to choose a cleaning company on stars. Most companies sit high. Read the newest reviews instead, and pay attention to how the owner answered the unhappy ones. On a Google profile you can also tap the topic tags above the reviews and pick the one that matches your job. Ten reviews about move-out cleans will tell you more than the average ever will.
Bright Oak Home Services started in Raleigh in 2025. Our cleaners are background-checked and insured, and besides Raleigh we have house cleaners in Cary, Durham, Apex, Wake Forest and Chapel Hill doing recurring, deep, move-in/move-out and Airbnb turnover cleans. Whoever you call, ask for the checklist first.
Grant Ugarte owns Bright Oak Home Services, a locally owned house cleaning company in Raleigh, North Carolina, serving homeowners and renters across the Triangle.