A beautifully clean Hanover Park home—without another thing to manage.

Serving Hanover Park

House cleaning paced for stairs and full houses

Happy Maids has cleaned houses in Hanover Park — ZIP 60133 — since 1985, from our office in Lake Barrington. Water is not the variable here: the village buys all of its supply through the Northwest Suburban Municipal Joint Action Water Agency — Lake Michigan water treated by Chicago, at roughly eight grains — so mineral film on shower glass is a footnote rather than the story. Traffic is the story. The average household here is 3.3 people against 2.4 for Cook County, so the same one or two baths and the same kitchen carry roughly twice the wear of a comparable house one town over.

The village was built in one twenty-year push: 62 percent of every home went up between 1970 and 1989. About 45 percent share a wall, and almost a third is attached townhouse, rowhouse or duplex against roughly 5 percent for Cook County. Olde Salem alone is 422 owner-occupied townhomes, and Greenbrook and Tanglewood share one association and a clubhouse on Catalina Drive. That means almost the same original package every time: a fiberglass tub-and-shower surround gone chalky, ceramic tile with grout that was never sealed. Chalky fiberglass is the surface oxidizing, not soil on top of it, and we say so rather than scrub at a finish that is already gone.

Manufacturing, health care and retail are the top industries here, which means shift work — somebody may be asleep after a night shift — so tell us at booking who is in the house and which bedroom to leave until last, and the team works room by room in a set order. Most homes here are entered not at the front door but onto a small tiled landing at the bottom of a staircase, so a whole winter of road salt and a whole summer of dust concentrate in about twenty-five square feet. That landing is where a visit here starts, and we work on coded or keyed access with the same background-checked team whenever we can.