The Maids of Brooklyn

We have been working with them for a while and they are pretty good. We would continue to use them in future.

I don't have a lot of time to clean on my own (I "tidy" every night), so the deep clean part of everything is very important to me. Although generally The Maids provided good service, I had to leave notes everytime and if I did not leave the note, the issue wouldn't be resolved or looked at. Sometimes, the clean was not very thorough; in fact, I had to ask them to clean the tub (!) on more than one occasion. After I had used them for awhile (and I did) I think the people who regularly came to my apartment just started to get what I wanted, and at that point, the service was quite good. I also appreciated the folding of laundry and such. But until there was a rapport, the cleaning could be spotty. In fact the next to last time I used the service, The Workers who came to my apartment that day left a note apologizing for the condition of the bathroom. I was forced to cancel their services forever, however, after my landlord banned them from coming into the building. She is a nosy parker, to put it mildly, but her comments were: "Your maid service: for the past several months I have been kind of checking on them because last Fall I discovered that they do not lock the entrance doors while working in your place. 1) they never lock the doors 2) their driver sits in the car and sleeps 3) most of the time the car is parked far away from our building 4) they mix up recyclables that you separeted with regular garbage and drop the various color bags in any bin , mostly the bin marked PAPER. 5) they carry or drag up their tools banging hard against wall/ spindles. This last time the banging was so hard it sounded like a heavy furniture rolled down steps." She concluded with: "Kindly please find a more caring cleaning service where workers know and understand the reason and necessity to lock entrance doors." I don't think The Maids are terrible (and Gale St. John is an efficient and professional owner), but I think they may be better for the occassional or "one off" type situation rather than the regular group. I am a huge tipper (I feel like people who are working hard to clean deserve it), but I'm not sure that those tips reflected the service I received.

They arrived on time, although the team was about twice the size they indicated would be here (6 people!). It seemed that they got in each others' way or stood around and talked a lot. Floors were mopped, although parts looked like the mop hadn't been rinsed out well (streaky/dirty), but not a huge problem since it was kind of dusty in the building. They scrubbed the bathroom... but the kitchen, well...Since I was in the middle of coordinating our move and my graduate school classes, I didn't do a thorough enough inspection of the kitchen before they left, and then I didn't see problems until 2 days later (we weren't living here yet). The bottom of the cabinets (above the counter tops) still had residue and/or smears of stuff on them. The inside of half of the cabinets looked like they had been wiped with a dirty rag. It was kind of icky, but I had too many other things going on to deal with them, and really, I didn't want them to clean any more.