Janitorial for an Atlanta building: pollen season, red clay, storm days

An Atlanta building’s janitorial scope should change with the calendar, and the changes belong in writing. Pollen weeks, rain that tracks red clay into the lobby, humid summers in restrooms and trash rooms, and fall leaf drop each earn their own lines and frequencies on the task list, instead of living in a crew’s memory.

What Atlanta’s climate and soil bring through the door

Our Atlanta janitorial page describes the local climate in a line written about houses: “the spring pollen film oak and pine push onto every sill, Georgia red clay carried in from the yard, and summer humidity that finds grout and shower glass.” A commercial building takes the same three loads through a door that opens all day, plus a fourth when those trees drop their leaves in the fall.

NOAA’s 1991–2020 climate normals for Hartsfield-Jackson put Atlanta’s average precipitation at about 50.4 inches a year, with measurable precipitation on roughly 116 days. July is both the wettest month and the one with the most wet days, and the same normals put its average high near 90°F.

The red clay is literal too. Soil survey data from the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service maps Cecil soils in Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb and Gwinnett counties, and the agency’s official description of the series puts a red clay it calls “sticky, plastic” under a few inches of sandy loam. Where grading or erosion bares it, it rides in on shoes, tires and hand trucks.

Pollen and leaf weeks: raise the entry lines, then write when they drop

Pollen rides in on clothes and with every swing of the door, and settles wherever the air slows down. Our Atlanta janitorial scope already carries “Entry glass, mats and thresholds” as a standing line. In pollen season, that line and a few around it should run at a higher frequency:

• Entry glass and vestibules. Every visit during the window, instead of the usual rotation.
• Walk-off mats. Vacuumed every visit. If the mats are rented, ask the rental company to shorten its swap interval for the same weeks.
• Lobby ledges, tables and directory boards. Damp-dusted, not dry-dusted: a dry cloth mostly moves pollen around.
• Supply and return grille covers in lobbies and corridors, wiped on a stated frequency. The filters, coils and ducts behind them belong to your HVAC contractor, a line our post on office cleaning and indoor air quality draws in detail.
• Elevator thresholds and door tracks. Vacuumed, because the grooves keep whatever the mats missed.

Then write the window itself: a start date, an end date, and the frequency each raised line runs at in between. A line that says “as needed” can’t be checked, and a raised frequency with no end date quietly becomes the new normal. Set the dates from what your own entrance showed last spring.

Fall runs a smaller version of the same play: leaves and grit pile into vestibules and soak the mats on wet days, so the entry lines come back up for the leaf weeks, with dates of their own. The sidewalk blower is usually the landscaper’s job; whatever crosses the threshold is janitorial.

Storm days and red clay: take it up dry, then mop

Water carries clay past the mats, and a mop that meets wet clay first turns it into a thin slurry that settles into grout lines and the edges of light floors. The fix is the order of work: once the soil has dried, vacuum or dust-mop it up, then damp-mop what remains.

A nightly crew can’t schedule the weather, so write rain as a condition, not a date: on any visit after rain, the entries, elevator lobbies and parking-deck stair landings get the extra pass. Our janitorial scope lists “Stairwells, landings and handrails” and “Hard-floor cleaning on a stated frequency”; the rain-day line says what that frequency becomes when the mats come back wet. Check it hardest in July.

Clay that reaches carpet runs on a different calendar. Vacuuming slows it down; extraction and refinishing are restorative work, scoped apart from the nightly crew pass, as our commercial floor cleaning schedule lays out.

Humid summer: restrooms, trash rooms and chutes

Heat and humidity turn small misses into smells, and in a July week a smell is often what a tenant notices first. Our Atlanta scope already names the rooms, “Trash rooms, chutes and dock areas” and “Shared restrooms sanitized and restocked”; summer is when they need written frequencies and two more checks on the sheet, odor and moisture:

• Trash rooms and chutes. Floors cleaned and the area under the chute checked on a set night, more often in summer.
• Restrooms. Floors and grout lines, with any standing moisture or musty corner noted for the property manager.
• Janitor’s closets. Mop heads swapped or laundered, buckets emptied and left to dry, so the closet isn’t its own source of odor.

One line isn’t cleaning at all. Mildew on grout is a cleaning line; mold growing on drywall or ceiling tile is a building problem, and the sheet should say it gets reported, not scrubbed. Our terms of service set our own limit plainly: “We reserve the right to refuse or stop service where conditions are unsafe for our team — such as mold, infestation, biohazards, or abusive behavior.”

Common areas or tenant suites: whose sheet is it?

In a multi-tenant building, whether a Midtown or Buckhead tower, a Sandy Springs or Perimeter Center floor plate, or a Peachtree Corners low-rise, two scopes usually meet at the suite door. Our janitorial page draws the split in one answer: “Scope, not skill. Office cleaning is a tenant suite; janitorial is the property — common areas, circulation and shared facilities on a nightly or set weekly rhythm.”

Most seasonal lines belong to the property, because pollen, clay and leaves hit entrances, lobbies, elevators and stairwells before any suite. Put them on the building’s sheet.

Managing more than one building? Our janitorial page describes how a portfolio is handled: “Each property gets its own scope sheet, its own night, and its own invoice, so a portfolio does not turn into one blurred line item.” A tower lobby and a campus building rarely take the seasons the same way, so each sheet should carry its own seasonal lines.

What to get in writing, from us or anyone

• An area-by-area task list with frequencies. Our Atlanta janitorial scope ends on exactly that line: “A written task list with frequencies, per area”.
• Seasonal lines as dated or conditional entries. A pollen window with start and end dates, a rain-day pass, leaf weeks, and summer frequencies for trash rooms and restrooms.
• Proof per visit. Our Atlanta commercial page describes ours: “On eligible completed visits we send a CleanCheck report: that visit’s task-list status, customer-safe photos, and the team’s notes.” And when a line slips: “If something misses the standard, you point at that visit’s photo and we make it right — nobody has to rely on memory.”
• The vendor file. The same commercial page lists “COI within 2 business hours”, “W-9 on request” and “Background-checked teams”.
• Billing that follows the sheet. Our janitorial page puts billing in two sentences: “Per visit, after the visit, against the written scope. No long-term lock-in — the scope is the contract, and it is short enough to read.”

A proposal that can’t show you where pollen season lives on the page is keeping it in someone’s head.

What we won’t put on the sheet

A standing day porter. Asked directly, our Atlanta janitorial page answers: “Not as a standing service today. If your building needs one we will say so plainly and scope what we can actually staff, rather than promising coverage we cannot hold.” A wet entry at 3pm on a storm day is a daytime-coverage question; a nightly scope meets it that evening.

Floor refinishing. The FAQ on our Miami-Dade janitorial page gives the company line: “We do not strip and wax, screen, or refinish floors — that is a flooring contractor's job, scheduled separately, and our crew works around it.”

Carpet extraction and HVAC work. Neither appears on our published janitorial scope; the floor-calendar post and the indoor-air post linked above draw both lines.

Promises we can’t keep. We won’t claim that a cleaner lobby eases anyone’s allergies or decides how a building fares in an inspection. A scope can promise only what it lists, visit by visit.

FAQ