Cleaning Services

Victor Pineda has found a pile of money in a hole in his Whittier backyard. Pineda fired his pool maintenance serviceman after the price rose to $72 from $65 a month, which didn't include filter cleaning or pump maintenance. That works out to nearly $900 in savings a year. Now he purchases chemicals every nine months to sustain appropriate levels of chlorine and pH. "It's not very hard to do it yourself," said Pineda, who has owned his pool since 1998. "I think I'm doing a good job.

I have been told that our workplace is cleaned after employees leave for the day. But in the area where I work the custodian comes into the room once a week while we are working and just cleans the carpet, nothing else. Just what is the standard in today's workplace regarding cleanliness? The standard is that there is no standard. As a result, some companies have pristine workplaces while others are so dirty that employees are tempted to come to work with dusters and a mop.

As part of a crackdown on California's underground economy, state officials sued two janitorial companies Wednesday, alleging "flagrant violations" of labor laws at restaurants in Los Angeles, San Diego and Orange counties. The suit accuses Excell Cleaning & Building Services Inc. and MO Restaurant Cleaning Services of California Inc.

He mowed his yard, refilled his prescriptions and mopped his living room floor. Then the elderly man went into his bedroom in this placid Alabama town, sat on his bed and fired a bullet into his head. It fell to Benjamin Lichtenwalner, an expert in the aftermath of violent death, to erase all signs of suicide. Blood and tissue stained the floor, walls, ceiling and curtains. A round from a .44 Smith & Wesson had left a perfect hole in a ceiling fan blade.

A Harvard University student's fledgling dorm-cleaning business faced the threat of a campus boycott Thursday after the school's daily newspaper criticized it as dividing students along economic lines. The Harvard Crimson newspaper urged students to shun Dormaid, a business launched by Harvard sophomore Michael E. Kopko that cleans up for messy students.

Janitors who clean offices of Boeing Co., Northrop Grumman Corp. and Raytheon Co. in El Segundo, Redondo Beach and Long Beach began walking off their jobs Wednesday after contract talks ended in an impasse. It was not clear how many janitors took part in the "rolling" strike, but the union representing the workers said the contract affected about 700 janitors who work for firms that provide cleaning services to the three aerospace companies.

A house is only as clean as its dirtiest window, and in the Southland there are a lot of grimy panes to wash after the spring rains. If you're a homeowner looking to hand over the dirty work to a professional window washer, you can expect to pay anywhere from $75 for a 700-square-foot condo to $300 for a two-story, 2,000-square-foot house, as long as there are no extenuating circumstances.

Mike Nicholson can stomach the most gruesome of death scenes -- from victims of violent crime and suicide to decomposing corpses -- without so much as a grimace. He even brings a grim sort of humor to his work -- such as his account of a man who shot himself in a sporting goods store. "There were parts of him everywhere," Nicholson said of the 1999 suicide. "He did it at the sporting goods desk, but he made it all the way to fishing."

Every other Wednesday at noon, housecleaning partners Dianne Kraus and Peggy Jackson pull up to a beige two-story house in Ithaca, N.Y. Although the owners are at work, the two women unlock the door and begin their orchestrated routine. For nearly three hours they vacuum, dust, polish and scrub, upstairs and down. "It smells so good and looks so clean when we come home," says Linda Klena, a nurse at Cornell University. She and her husband, a dean at Ithaca College, used to share the cleaning.