Window Cleaning in Myrtle Beach, SC

Most of the glass we clean inside the Myrtle Beach city limits belongs to a property someone else is about to walk into. Between Ocean Boulevard and Market Common the housing stock leans heavily toward short-term rentals, and that changes what window cleaning is for. On an owner-occupied house, dirty panes are a slow annoyance you notice in June and deal with eventually. On a rental, the windows are graded by a stranger on arrival day, in the first ten minutes, against the photographs they booked from. That is a revenue question rather than a cosmetic one, and it is why the schedule here follows the turnover calendar instead of the seasons.

Glass on a rental block is graded on arrival day

The practical consequence is that the deadline is a check-in time, not a month. A unit that flips every Saturday has a working gap of a few hours between one party leaving and the next arriving, and no owner wants a crew still on the ladder when a car pulls into the space. So we book city work either mid-week, when the calendar has a genuine hole in it, or in the shoulder weeks before the summer run starts and after it ends. The spring slot that makes sense for a house inland is the worst possible slot here, because it lands the visit at the exact moment the property is earning. Owners who plan a year ahead tend to put us in twice: once before the season opens and once as it closes.

The slider does more work than every window in the unit

On an oceanfront or ocean-block property the sliding door out to the balcony sees more hands, more traffic and more weather than the rest of the glazing put together, and it is the first thing to fail. It is also the pane a guest photographs, because it is the one with the view behind it. When we quote a unit near the Boulevard we price the slider as its own piece of work rather than counting it as one window, and we look at the bottom rail and the handle side first, because that is where a season of wet swimsuits, sunscreen and salt spray collects into a film that does not come off with a household spray bottle.

Sand in the track is abrasive, not dirt

Wind carries dry sand off the beach and up over the dune line, and it settles in the bottom track of any door left open to the breeze. Sand in a track is not dirt. It is an abrasive sitting under a heavy panel on steel rollers. Drag the door across it enough times and two things happen: the rollers flatten and begin to bind, and the grit works its way up the frame and scores the lower pane in fine horizontal lines. We pull the sand out of the tracks with a vacuum and a brush as part of the job, because leaving it there undoes the rest of the work by August. It takes a few extra minutes per door and it is the single cheapest thing an owner on this side of town can do to keep a slider out of a repair bill.

What washing will not bring back

Once a roller has collapsed or the track lip is bent, the door needs hardware, and that is a door contractor rather than us. We will say so and leave it alone instead of forcing it. The same honesty applies to two other things owners here regularly ask us to return to new. Glass that has been scoured by blown sand is scratched, not soiled, and the marks are still there after the pane is spotless. And a screen on the ocean side that has gone dull grey is usually not dirty either: salt corrodes the mesh and the frame from the surface inward, so an oxidized screen washes out to the same grey it started at. Replacement mesh is inexpensive. A second cleaning of it is money spent on nothing, and we would rather tell you that before the invoice than after.

Where our reach stops on the oceanfront

Height is the limit worth stating before you call. Our reach is a water-fed pole, which comfortably covers a house, a beach cottage, and the low-rise buildings that make up most of the blocks off the Boulevard. It does not cover the oceanfront towers. A high-rise needs suspended access and a contractor licensed and rigged for it, and anyone who tells you otherwise about a fifteen-story building is quoting a job they intend to do badly. If your unit sits above roughly the fourth floor, the honest answer is that you want a high-rise glazing outfit. We would rather give you that answer on the phone than after we have arrived, and we will not quote a building we cannot reach safely from the ground.

How a turnover visit is sequenced

Interior glass in a rental is touched by everyone and shows fingerprints at child height on every slider, while the exterior face carries the salt film that arrives on the onshore wind. Doing one face without the other leaves the pane looking half finished from inside, which is the view the guest actually has, so both faces are done in the same visit and the tracks and sills come with them. Where the whole exterior is due for attention as well, the sensible pairing is to have house washing in Myrtle Beach booked into the same window, with the glass taken up at the end of that visit once the walls have been rinsed and the run-off has stopped coming down. Sequenced the other way round, the wash puts dirty water back over clean panes and the glass has to be done twice.