Closets: the room a quick clean skips, and what cleaning one properly involves

Ask people which rooms they want cleaned and you'll hear kitchen, bathrooms, floors. Almost nobody says closets. The door is shut, the contents look tidy, and the floor mostly hides under shoes. So closets get skipped in a quick clean, and sometimes in a regular one too, and the dust just keeps settling.

That's a shame, because a closet is small, enclosed and full of fabric. Clothes shed lint. Shoes bring in grit. Cardboard boxes break down into fine dust. Air moves slowly in there, so what settles stays. Cleaning one properly is not hard, but it does take a plan.

Why closets get missed

A quick clean is built around what you can see from the middle of the room: counters, mirrors, floors, the top of the dresser. A closet interior is out of sight. The cleaner would have to move things, reach into corners and decide what to do about items that belong to someone else. When time is short, that's the first job to drop.

There's another reason. A closet looks done when it's tidy, and a tidy closet is not the same as a clean one. Folded sweaters can sit on a dusty shelf for a year.

What a proper closet clean involves

Here's the sequence that works, whether the closet is a small reach-in or a walk-in with built-ins.

• Remove what you can. Even pulling everything off one shelf at a time lets you reach the surface underneath. In a walk-in, clear the floor completely.
• Dust from the top down: the upper shelf, the rod, any hooks, then the walls. A microfiber cloth holds dust where a feather duster just moves it around.
• Wipe the shelves and the shelf edges. Wire shelving collects a surprising amount along the wires, so run a damp cloth along each one.
• Clean the door, the door frame and the track if it's a sliding door. Tracks collect hair and grit, and a vacuum crevice tool followed by a damp cloth clears them.
• Wipe the baseboard along the back and sides. Closets have baseboards too, and they collect as much as any other room's.
• Vacuum the floor last, including the corners and under any shoe racks, then mop if the surface allows it.

The slow parts are the shelves and the corners

Corners are where dust piles up because nothing disturbs it. A vacuum with a narrow attachment does better here than a cloth. Run it along the joint where the floor meets the wall, then along the underside of each shelf if it overhangs.

Shelves are the other sticking point. If a shelf holds items you don't want moved, such as stacked boxes, photo albums or things that aren't yours, a good cleaner will work around them and tell you what they couldn't reach, rather than shove everything aside. If you can clear a shelf ahead of time, the result is better.

Pet hair, shoes and the floor

Closet floors take the worst of it. Shoes shed grit, pets nap on piles of clothes, and the dust that sinks from above lands there. If your closet has carpet, a slow pass with a vacuum beats a fast one, because hair works deep into the fibers. If it has hard flooring, vacuum first and mop second so the grit doesn't scratch the surface.

This is also a good moment to pull out the shoe pile, shake or wipe each pair and decide what's staying. A cleaner can't decide that for you, but the floor can't be cleaned until the shoes move.

What a closet tells you about the whole clean

Here's a useful test. When you're judging whether someone really cleaned your home, open a closet. If the shelf edges are wiped, the baseboard is dust free and the floor goes all the way to the corners, the rest of the house probably got the same attention. If the closet is untouched, the work stopped at what's visible.

One Google reviewer, Lisha Bennett, noticed exactly that. She wrote that the cleaner “took her time to not just surface clean but got to every corner, closets included and I really appreciate that!” Notice what she's praising. It isn't a shiny countertop. It's the part of the job nobody would have seen if it hadn't been done.

Making it easy for your cleaner

A few small steps make a big difference. Take anything off the closet floor that you don't want vacuumed around. Bag the clothes you're donating so they aren't in the way. Tell your cleaner which closets you'd like included, because a walk-in master closet is a different job from a hall closet with a vacuum and a stack of towels.

If you'd like closets covered as part of a whole-home clean in Irvine or elsewhere in Orange County, ask when you book. Claudia’s Cleaning Services answers at (714) 296-6018, Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Saturday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mention the closets by name, and they'll be on the list rather than an afterthought.