About Glass Guru Window Cleaning

Bernard Marsalese and Andrew Bradley founded Glass Guru Window Cleaning in 2014, while the two of them were students at Michigan State University. It started the way a lot of window cleaning companies do: a ladder, a bucket, a squeegee and a short list of neighbors willing to give somebody young a chance. It's still owner-operated, and it isn't a franchise.

Our tagline is that window cleaning is a pain in the glass, and that's the whole reason the business exists.

Glass around here gets dirty in a few specific ways. Tap water in this part of Michigan is moderately hard, about 6 grains per gallon in local water reports, so a sprinkler that hits the same pane every morning leaves a white film that builds up. Road salt coats storm doors and lower windows from December through March, spring pollen comes off the mature trees, and freeze and thaw works grit into every seal and track.

So the inside and the outside get cleaned differently. Inside glass is cleaned by hand, with the screens, sills and tracks included. Outside glass gets pure water through a pole, with the minerals taken out first, so it dries without spots and nobody leans a ladder on your gutters.

The houses vary a lot, too. The 1990s and 2000s subdivisions in Novi and Canton have two-story foyers and tall arched windows that need a pole and a plan. Downtown Northville and Plymouth are older, with divided-light sash and storm windows, where the wrong tool can crack a pane in a hundred-year-old house.

One more thing about our home town: the City of Northville sits right on the Wayne and Oakland county line, which runs along Eight Mile Road, the road a lot of people here still call Baseline. We work both sides of it.