Cleaning Services in Galveston

Kiwi Cleaning covers Galveston County: the island, the mainland cities running north along I-45, and the Bolivar Peninsula across the ferry. That is a wider spread than it sounds, because those three places do not ask the same thing of a cleaning company. A crew working a beach house on the West End on Saturday morning and a family home in League City on Monday morning is doing two unrelated jobs, and we would rather build for both than pretend one of them is the whole market.

Start with the part most companies here under-serve, because it is the biggest: most people in this county do not live on the island. League City alone has about 116,000 residents, and adding Texas City, Friendswood, Dickinson, La Marque and Santa Fe puts roughly 266,000 year-round residents between the causeway and Clear Creek. Among all of those households there are fewer than 500 seasonal-use homes out of about 105,000. That is ordinary suburban and working-household territory, and it wants ordinary things: a standing weekly or biweekly appointment, a deep clean twice a year, a move-out clean that passes somebody else's walkthrough.

The island is a different building stock and a different problem. Victorian and Craftsman houses in the East End Historic District and the blocks behind The Strand, mid-century condos and older bungalows along the Seawall and 61st Street, and multi-story houses on pilings out west. The Seawall itself -- ten miles long and seventeen feet tall, built in answer to the 1900 hurricane that is still the deadliest natural disaster in United States history -- is the reference point locals give directions from, and the reason the city is laid out the way it is. What the coast actually does to a house is specific: salt film on glass and screens, blown sand in every entry and stairwell, and humidity-driven mildew in grout and on exterior surfaces, in a place that takes more than 47 inches of rain a year. Our 42-point checklist gives glass, tracks, screens and grout their own line items here for exactly that reason.

Then there is the turnover half of the market, and it is not small. Galveston's West End -- ZIP 77554 -- has more housing units than it has residents, and better than four in ten of them are seasonal-use. Across the peninsula the share is close to four in ten as well. Between the island and Bolivar that is thousands of vacation homes, and they run on a calendar rather than a to-do list: peak season June through August with July the strongest month, a sharp spring-break spike in March, Mardi Gras Galveston in late winter, the Lone Star Rally in November -- the island's biggest weekend of the year -- Dickens on The Strand the first weekend of December, and cruise turnaround days at the port when several ships board at once. January is the trough, which is precisely when off-season deep cleans and owner-arrival cleans earn their keep.

Bolivar is its own operating problem and we will be straight about it. The only way there from the island is the free TxDOT Galveston-Port Bolivar ferry, roughly every thirty minutes in daylight and hourly after dark, more often in season. Routing software will tell you Crystal Beach is a forty-minute drive; that assumes no queue, and in summer the wait alone can beat it. We schedule peninsula work around that reality instead of promising a crossing time we do not control. It is also why almost every house out there stands on pilings -- Hurricane Ike destroyed or severely damaged 62 percent of the structures on the peninsula in 2008 -- and stairs are part of every turnover on that side of the market.

Commercial work here splits across two economies that have nothing to do with each other. On the island: UTMB Health, the county's largest employer by a wide margin on an 84-acre campus, the Port of Galveston and its cruise terminals, Moody Gardens, Schlitterbahn, Texas A&M University at Galveston, and the hotel and restaurant belt along the Seawall. On the mainland: Marathon's Galveston Bay Refinery, one of the largest refineries in the United States, the petrochemical complex around it, and College of the Mainland. We take offices, clinics, retail and hospitality on the island and janitorial and industrial-site work on the mainland, quoted after we walk the building rather than over the phone.

Kiwi is new to Galveston County, and we would rather say so than dress it up. Companies have been cleaning this county for decades and several of them are good at it. What travels with us is the part that does not depend on how long we have been in town: a written 42-point checklist every visit follows, eco-friendly products that are safe around children and pets, all supplies and equipment brought to the job, a fast answer on whether we can cover your dates, and the Kiwi Clean Guarantee -- if a clean is not right, we come back and reclean it free within 24 hours, with no fine print. Every page on this site exists in Spanish as well as English, and you can request a quote and handle scheduling in either language. About a quarter of this county is Hispanic, and the share reaches 38 percent in parts of Texas City and passes 40 percent in Dickinson, so that is not a translated afterthought for us.