Window Cleaning in Farmington Hills, MI

Farmington Hills has about thirty-five thousand households and wraps around the smaller City of Farmington. Its detached homes are mostly colonials, quad-levels and ranches built through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, many with their original aluminum-framed glass and a fair number with skylights. There are also many condos and apartments, where the outside glass is up to an association. Tell us which kind of home you have, and we'll quote the part that's yours to book.

If the bottom inch of your glass has a mark that comes right back after cleaning, the frame is the reason. Aluminum sliders and fixed windows from this era drain through small channels along the sill, and after decades those channels are packed with grit, pollen and road salt. Water backs up, sits against the glass and dries there. We clear the channels, clean the sill, and then clean the glass, in that order, because that's the order that holds. Clear channels also keep water from finding its way inside, which matters more than a clean window.

Two features define the 1970s and 1980s houses here: the big fixed picture window and the skylight. Neither opens, both are usually high, and neither gets cleaned between professional visits. We do the outside of picture windows from the ground with a pole and the inside by hand or by pole, depending on the height. Skylights we clean from above where the roof allows it safely, and from below on the inside. If a roof's pitch or condition means we shouldn't be up there, we'll say so.

Half the homes in Farmington Hills are older than 1978 and half are newer, by the Census Bureau's five-year survey for 2020–2024, and about six in ten went up between 1960 and 1989. Those are the years double-pane glass took over. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found it held about a fifth of the home window market in the early 1970s, and about nine in ten windows sold used it by the mid 1990s.

A double-pane window is sealed around its edge, and seals wear out. A 25-year field study started in 1980, backed by HUD and the window industry, found that units built to the lower test standards failed at about four times the rate of the best ones, 14 percent against 3.6. When a seal goes, moist air gets between the panes and leaves a fog or white haze inside the glass. Cleaning can't reach it from either side, and the fix is repairing or replacing the glass unit. We'll point out any panes that have it, so you know the haze that's left after we clean is sealed inside the window.

A few buildings here are much older than any of that. The city's historic sites include the Lemuel Botsford House, the Orville Botsford House and the Botsford Inn on Grand River, which began as Orrin Weston's home in 1836 and became a tavern in 1841. If you live in an older house with wood sash, we clean that glass by hand, one pane at a time, the way we do in downtown Northville.

Outside cleaning stops in November and starts again in March, and inside cleaning runs through the winter. Fall is the busiest stretch here because of the tree cover: people want the glass done and the gutters cleared in the same few weeks, so it's worth booking both in one call before late October.