A cleaning service takes off the film sitting on a hard surface — shower tile and glass, sound grout, sound caulk, a vent cover, a track. A remediation company removes and replaces the material the growth got into: drywall, ceiling texture, insulation, a duct lining. JAS does the first and sells neither mold testing nor remediation.
They are not competitors but two points in one sequence — and what costs money is rarely the wrong choice, it is the wrong order.
Two trades, two different things for sale
- A cleaning company sells surfaces. Scheduled checklist work on finishes staying exactly where they are: shower tile and glass, sound grout and caulk, a vent cover, a sill, a track. It ends with the room clean and the building still whole.
- A remediation company sells removal. The work starts where wiping stops: colonised material comes out, gets disposed of, and something new goes back. That is construction — a project with a start and an end, not a service you put on a calendar every other Tuesday.
Put that way it answers itself: if the job is to take something out of the building, it is not cleaning. If the building stays intact, it is.
“If the job ends with material in a truck, it was never cleaning. If it ends with a clean room, it never needed construction.”
Shower mildew is ours
Worth saying plainly, because plenty of people arrive here from the bathroom. Speckling along grout lines, the caulk bead, the glass and the slider track is ordinary work: on a deep clean, grout spot-treatment is a published item on the 42-item list.
Four signs it has stopped being routine cleaning. A caulk bead black through the rubber rather than on it: cut out and replaced. Grout that crumbles under a thumbnail: re-grouting. A spotty ceiling above the shower because steam never escaped: investigate the cause. And widespread or recurring visible growth: stop ordinary cleaning and consult a qualified remediation professional, even when the surface looks hard and does not appear to need replacement.
That one is more local than it looks: plenty of Miami apartment bathrooms have no window, so steam leaves through an exhaust fan or not at all. If it runs a minute and clicks off, the steam stays — and changing how long it runs settles more than any product.
The order the calls go in
- First: whoever owns the water. A plumber, a roofer, an A/C technician — or the association, if it arrives through a cavity or riser that is not yours. Nothing downstream holds while water is still arriving.
- Second: whoever owns the material. If it is in the drywall face, ceiling texture, insulation, a soft cabinet floor or a duct lining, the next call is the trade that removes and replaces material. Not us, and not a cleaner who says yes.
- Third: the surface — our step. Once the water is settled and a finish is what remains, it is cleaning again: grout, glass, caulk, vent covers, tracks, the buildup around the repair. The one step of the three JAS books.
If step two is what you are unsure about, we take that apart in when to call a professional instead of cleaning it yourself. Here only one thing matters: step three never goes first.
What happens if you call us first
It is written down. Our Terms put it this way — we reserve the right to refuse or stop service where conditions are unsafe for our team, such as mold, infestation, biohazards, or abusive behavior; if we stop early for safety, a partial refund applies for the unworked portion.
Which is why it is worth saying at booking rather than at the door: told in advance, the crew arrives knowing which rooms are in. And we sell nothing that “prevents” a return — if the steam, the leak or the airflow are unchanged, it returns.
In a building you may not get to choose at all
Before hiring anyone, read the declaration. The wall cavity, the riser and the envelope may not be yours; if the water arrives from there, report it in writing — not for a legal reason we are qualified to explain, but because a wall you have already wiped is a wall with no record of what happened.
Then there is access, which applies to whoever you hire: vendors registered at the front desk, a certificate of insurance on file before a crew gets past the lobby, service elevators by reservation and time slot — we lay that out in the apartment and condo guide. A crew carrying material out through that corridor meets the heavyweight version of it.
Ours is published: $2,000,000 general liability coverage, every cleaner background-checked; the certificate is requested by email with “COI” in the subject and most return within 2 business hours. If registrations come up, ask whoever requires one which one they mean — that map is in “licensed, bonded and insured”.
What Miami does to this question
The rainy half of the year runs roughly May into October, and in it the shower that would dry overnight in a dry climate does not. That changes not who cleans it but how often. The deep-clean page says as much: most Miami homes benefit from a deep clean two to three times a year, because humidity, salt air, and year-round pollen mean buildup happens faster here than in drier climates.
Hurricane season, June through November, seals the house: windows shut for weeks, shutters up, sometimes no power and therefore no air conditioning. After that the honest first call is not a cleaning company — we walk that order through in cleaning up after a hurricane.
And if you host short-term, the calendar decides. Between a checkout and a check-in there are hours, not days: enough to clean a finish, not to take material out. Finding it that morning is not a cleaning emergency — it is blocking the date, not hunting a faster crew.
Quick answers
Do maids clean mildew in showers?
Yes — speckling on grout lines, a caulk bead, glass and the door track is ordinary bathroom work, and grout spot-treatment is a published item on the deep clean’s 42-item list. What changes the answer is not how dark it is but what it is sitting on.
Will the cleaners at least tell me whether it is mold?
No, and a company that says otherwise is guessing on your behalf. JAS books no testing and no identification. A crew tells you the one thing a cleaner is qualified to: whether that surface is one we clean, or one our Terms say we stop at.
What product kills it?
We make no such claim about any product; we would be inventing it. The only honest source on what a product is registered to do, and how to use it, is the label on the bottle in your hand. One thing flatly: never combine bleach with vinegar or an ammonia cleaner.
Someone already cut out the drywall. Can you clean up after them?
Usually not a deep clean — it is post-construction cleaning, because cutting and rebuilding puts fine dust into tracks, vents and fixtures in rooms nobody worked in. It books through our deep-clean flow but is priced as post-construction, starting at $650 for the first 1,000 sq ft, with exact scope and price confirmed before scheduling.
Is it cheaper to just have the cleaner deal with it?
Only if it never comes back, and that is the whole question. Cleaning a sound finish is a purchase that ends; cleaning over material that is not is a subscription nobody sold you on purpose.
The short version
If the building stays intact and a finish is what is left, call a cleaning company — shower mildew lands there. If material has to come out, call the remediation company, and call it after whoever fixes the water. Size of the patch rarely decides it: the fan in a windowless bathroom does, and so does the building that decides who gets past the desk.
From the JAS operating playbook — including the half where we send you elsewhere.