A beautifully clean Prospect Heights home—without another thing to manage.

Serving Prospect Heights

There is no standard Prospect Heights house

Happy Maids has cleaned houses in Prospect Heights — ZIP 60070 — since 1985, from our office in Lake Barrington. Start with the water: city water is Lake Michigan water at about eight grains, but the city pipes it to only part of town, and the houses it has not reached run private wells with their own softeners, so film on glass is a street-by-street question. The other constant is grit. A lot of neighborhoods have no curb and gutter at all — the pavement drains into soft shoulders and swales — so on a half-acre lot with a long driveway the dirt arrives by the door, and the entry, the door track and the first ten feet of hard floor take longest.

Barely two percent of the housing predates 1940 and about 35 percent went up between 1940 and 1969, when people bought half-acre lots and built one house at a time for decades. You can read it off the street signs: the long straight Old Town grid around Palatine Road, Ridge and Kenilworth; the curving Country Gardens loops off Hintz and Schoenbeck; an equestrian pocket on Highgoal and Paddock. Expect converted porches, added sunrooms, odd half-flights of stairs and a bath squeezed into what used to be a closet. East of the old Soo Line tracks it changes completely: Willow Trails, Country Pines, River Trails and Willow Woods are townhomes and condos, so all of the work is inside.

Nearly one in five residents is 65 or older and 31 percent of households are one person, so someone is often home while we clean — we work room by room in a set order, which keeps the rest of the house quiet and usable. More than 40 percent of residents were born outside the United States; shoes-off households are common, and so are firm preferences about which products come in. Tell the office once and it lives on your notes. Where nobody is home we work on coded or keyed access with the same background-checked team whenever we can.