North Myrtle Beach has more seasonal homes than it has residents, and that single fact explains almost everything about cleaning here. Just under 20,000 people live in the city full time. It contains 27,608 housing units, and 13,347 of them -- 48 percent -- are counted as seasonal, recreational or occasional-use. Half the town, in other words, is somebody's beach house, condo or rental rather than somebody's address.
The city is really four beach towns that merged: Cherry Grove at the north end, then Ocean Drive, Crescent Beach and Windy Hill running south toward the Myrtle Beach line. Cherry Grove is beach houses and channels; Ocean Drive still carries the shag-dancing scene that made it famous, with the OD Pavilion and the beach clubs; Barefoot Landing sits on the waterway with the Alabama Theatre and House of Blues; and Barefoot Resort puts four championship golf courses along the Intracoastal. The Cherry Grove Pier runs 985 feet into the Atlantic.
For cleaning, the work splits cleanly in two. Turnovers are the beach side: peak-season rentals still run Saturday to Saturday, so the entire town changes over in a single day, and a big multi-story beach house with bunk rooms is a different job from a two-bedroom oceanfront condo. Recurring house cleaning is the resident side, and it is bigger than the visitor numbers suggest -- roughly 42 percent of North Myrtle Beach residents are 65 or older, which is exactly the household that keeps a cleaner on a schedule year after year.
We are about 20 miles up the coast from Myrtle Beach, half an hour on a normal day and longer on a summer Saturday, with Cherry Grove another few minutes past that. If you own here, tell us your changeover dates as far ahead as you have them -- Saturdays fill first, everywhere on this coast, and we would rather confirm what we can cover than take a booking we cannot honor.
