As a public service, I thought I would relate my experience with an Ottawa cleaning company.  I will not resort to hyperbole – just the facts.

In early April, we were getting ready to sell our home.  At the suggestion of our realtor, we called Jaiko Cleaning Services to get the house ready for showings.  We booked two guys for four hours of cleaning.  The list of what needed to be done wasn’t that long – a couple of bathrooms, kitchen cupboards, finger prints on walls, etc.

I got a call that afternoon at around 12:30 telling me the job was done.  It was only three hours instead of four, so I assumed they had been efficient and I’d come home to a sparkling house.

Uh, no.

The first thing I saw was this:

That is our kitchen counter, minus a five-inch strip of laminate along the edge.  There was no message that it had been broken off, no “oops, sorry about that”.  It didn’t turn up in a quick search of the garbage – it was simply gone.

We walked through the rest of the house, and honestly, we couldn’t figure out what the two men had done while they were here.  There was white residue on the oven, the fridge door was covered by a greasy film, the floor was dirty.  How can a house look so dirty after six hours of cleaning by professionals?

Oh yeah, our broom was missing, too.  I had left it in the foyer, and unless someone had broken in that afternoon and stolen our broom (leaving our other treasures untouched), I have to assume it somehow went away with the cleaners.

That evening I headed out to Home Depot in a desperate search for a quick fix for the laminate countertop.  We had showings scheduled for the next day, and I felt sick to my stomach thinking of people walking through our kitchen and seeing the exposed particle board. The nice woman at Home Depot said it would probably take three weeks to order it in, and even then it might not match. I would characterize my emotions at that point as a mix of despair and rage.

The ensuing customer service experience has not been stellar.  We phoned the next day and explained the situation, then followed up with an e-mail with a photo of the counter on Monday.  Time passed and we heard nothing, so my wife called to follow up again.  After nearly four weeks, someone from Jaiko called about the countertop – keep in mind that during that four weeks we were trying to sell our home, so we had already fixed it as best we could.  Nothing was said about the other issues we had.

In the end, we paid for four hours of cleaning.  We got three hours of poor-quality cleaning, and returned to a home that had been damaged without explanation.  And our broom was missing.

And don’t even get me started about what happened with the cat…

So that’s our story.  Perhaps ours was a one-in-a-million bad day and everyone else has had a great experience.  Just thought anyone looking for an Ottawa cleaner should have a heads-up.