Chandelier Cleaning in Metro Detroit

Forced-air heat is the main reason. From November through March the furnace cycles with the house shut up, and each cycle pushes fine dust out of the registers. The dust rises and settles on the highest surfaces in the house, and a chandelier is mostly high surfaces.

Five months of heating season is a long time for dust to build up, and the fixture is too high for anyone to see it from below. What people notice is a dim entry. They change the bulbs, which doesn't help much, and then try brighter bulbs, which doesn't help either, because the light is being absorbed by a grey film before it leaves the fixture.

Kitchen fixtures have a second problem. Cooking grease rises and lands on pendants over the island and anything above the stove, where it mixes with dust into a sticky film that dusting won't lift. Those fixtures need washing.

We turn the power off at the switch, and at the breaker when the fixture calls for it, and cover the floor and furniture below. Then we work from the top down. Crystal drops and prisms come off and get cleaned by hand, glass shades get washed, and the frame, arms and canopy get wiped. Everything goes back exactly where it came from.

There's a faster method, sometimes sold as drip cleaning, where the fixture gets sprayed over a sheet on the floor and left to drip dry. It can work on a simple glass fixture over a forgiving floor. Over hardwood or tile it's a bad idea, it won't touch the sticky film on a kitchen pendant, and it leaves the metal frame dirty. On real crystal we take the pieces off and clean them by hand.

Bulbs are the other half of the visit. Candelabra bulbs in a foyer fixture burn out one at a time, and since changing one means the same climb as cleaning, the dead ones add up. We check every socket and replace the failed bulbs while the equipment is up. Leave out the bulbs you want used, or tell us the type ahead of time.

We also tell you what we find. Loose pins, missing crystals, a cracked arm or a canopy that isn't sitting flush all get pointed out, so nothing is left for the next person to discover.

This is the real reason to hire someone. A foyer chandelier in a 1990s or 2000s colonial hangs eighteen to twenty-two feet up, over tile or hardwood, often out past the edge of the stairs. No household ladder reaches it safely, and improvised setups with stair treads and a plank are how people get badly hurt at home.

We bring equipment suited to the space and protect the floor and stairs before we start. Some fixtures hang on a winch and can be lowered, which makes the job faster. Plenty of homeowners don't know whether theirs does until someone gets up there and looks.

While the equipment is up, other high jobs in the same space are easy to add: ceiling fan blades in a vaulted great room, a plant shelf nobody has reached in years, the top of a two-story window frame. It's worth a walk through the house with us to point them out.

These three jobs fall into the same gap: glass in a house that isn't a window, so it never gets included in anything.

We clean mirrors too: bathroom mirrors, full-wall mirrors, closet doors and over-mantel mirrors. Full-wall mirrors are worth doing properly, because glass cleaner and paper towels leave a haze you only see when light hits it from the side, and once it builds up it has to be stripped off.

Glass rails on an interior stair or a balcony over a two-story room get touched on both sides all day and sit right where everyone looks. They clean quickly, and the difference is bigger than the effort. Outside, glass deck and balcony railings collect the same sprinkler spots as windows, and they need the same pure-water cleaning.

Outdoor light fixtures are a small job of their own. Coach lights, post lamps and soffit fixtures fill with bugs and cobwebs, and a dirty fixture makes the entry look dim and the walkway feel unsafe. We open them, clean the glass and the housing, clear out what's collected and replace dead bulbs. It's quick to add to an window cleaning visit, since we're already working around the house.

Plan on a yearly cleaning, ideally in spring, right after the heating season. Fixtures over a dining table or a kitchen island do better twice a year. One in a formal room nobody uses can wait two years.

The easiest way to schedule it is with an interior window cleaning visit. Both are indoor work, both are best done in the first half of the year, and both keep going after the outside work stops in November.

Chandelier cleaning is priced per fixture. Its height, the access, the number of pieces and whether it can be lowered all move the price, so a five-arm glass fixture in a dining room and a three-tier crystal cascade in a twenty-foot foyer are very different jobs.

A photo from the floor looking up and a rough ceiling height are usually enough for us to quote it without a visit.