Window Washing in Arlington Heights, IL

Hard water staining and neglected tracks have a way of turning what looks like a half-day job into a full one. That was the situation at this two-story house in Arlington Heights, where our technician arrived at eight in the morning expecting roughly four hours of work. The 27 windows had accumulated a season's worth of bug activity — spider webs packed into corners, insect debris crusted along the frames — and the tracks showed the kind of buildup that comes from years of moisture cycling through aluminum channels. It was the sort of job that looks manageable from the driveway and reveals itself once you're up close.

Working through the full interior and exterior, he cleaned all 27 windows and pulled and washed 24 screens through a soapy rinse before setting them back in place. The hard water deposits took time and deliberate work to lift without marking the glass. The tracks and frames across the house were in rough shape — dried debris, oxidized grime, the kind of buildup that requires a detail pass with a tool rather than a quick wipe — and he worked each one down before moving on. What he'd planned as a four-hour day stretched to seven and a half, but he stayed with the work until every frame was clean and every screen back in its opening.