Cleaning Hacks You Can Only Get From A Professional

There are those who are clean. Their apartments and houses shine with the sparkle of frequent care. Their bed corners are always tucked. Their dishes done. Then there are the people who don't own vacuums or toilet brushes; whose dishes pile into a Tetris game of grime.

I would like to think that I lie somewhere in the middle. Neither fastidiously neat or slovenly, some of my rooms are usually clean some of the time. They're just never clean at the same time. My bed is usually made, just don't look at what's crammed underneath it. It's totally passable, and if you came by for a drink, you wouldn't recoil in horror. (Well, unless you're my mom, and I've given up on ever having a house clean enough to meet her standards anyway.)

I think most people, or at least most people in their 20s, feel similarly about their cleaning abilities: Not the best, but not in danger of being declared an environmental disaster, either. But I would like to be better, because even if you, my theoretical drinks date, don't notice the ring on the tub or dust on the shelves, I know it's there. And even when I do dust or scrub, I never get the true deep-clean spark that I want. I am ready to graduate from having a fairly clean apartment to a really clean one.

So I asked the best person I could find: Joshua, a professional cleaner and founder of Broadway Maids. His team of NYC artists and actors in need of a side hustle have been scrubbing and sweeping New Yorkers' apartments since 2015, and I was eager to see what tips he could give me.

As it turns out, a really, really clean apartment was within my reach — and if you keep reading, it'll be within yours, too.