Cleaning Services on the Old Mission Peninsula

The Old Mission Peninsula is the largest place we serve outside Traverse City itself, and the closest. Peninsula Township holds 6,068 people, which is more than any village in this market, and the peninsula runs about seventeen miles north from its base inside the city into Grand Traverse Bay. Its southern end is the city. That means there is effectively no drive to get here -- an address on the peninsula is easier for us to schedule than an address at the far end of a township.

It is farm country and wine country wearing the same coat. Eleven wineries operate on the peninsula, which is the federally recognized Old Mission Peninsula AVA, and cherry orchards run down both arms of the bay on ground that has been worked for well over a century. A designated Pure Michigan Byway Scenic Route runs the length of it, and Mission Point Lighthouse stands near the tip, close to the 45th parallel. The year-round communities are Old Mission, Mapleton -- founded in 1859 by the Ogden family of New York -- and Neahtawanta.

What matters most about this peninsula for a cleaning company is what it is not. It is residential end to end. Houses here are lived in year-round or kept for owners who come back to them, and the calendar we work to belongs to the household rather than to anybody else. So the work is recurring house cleaning for households who are here all the time, absent-owner care for the waterfront and hillside second homes on both arms of the bay, seasonal open-and-close visits, and deep cleans when a house changes hands. We do not write about this peninsula the way we write about the Leelanau side, because it is not the same market and pretending otherwise would waste your time and ours.

The houses themselves ask for specific attention. Water-facing glass is the whole point of a bay house and it shows every mark, wood floors run through most of these properties, screened porches collect a summer of pollen and orchard dust, and the sand and lake water that come off a beach in July are a different problem from the road salt, snowmelt and mud that arrive between November and April in a place that takes about 101 inches of snow a year. Entries, thresholds, mud rooms, hard floors and window tracks are line items on our checklist rather than upgrades, and on a bay house the glass gets treated as part of the view rather than as a chore at the end.

We also work for the businesses on the peninsula. Eleven wineries means tasting rooms, event spaces and restrooms that have to be presentable before the first car comes up the drive, and that work is scoped the same way our commercial work is scoped anywhere else: a walk-through first, then a written scope of work, then the same result every visit.