DIY vs professional window cleaning: the honest ledger
DIY window cleaning is worth it at ground level — a decent squeegee and ten minutes of technique will get you clean glass. The gap is everything else: purified water, second-storey height, tracks and screens, and a full Saturday. Professional window cleaning starts at $150; most single-storey homes run $150-$550 by window count, and two storeys adds about 40%.
What DIY genuinely gets right
The technique is real, but it is not guarded. A bucket, a drop of dishwashing liquid, an applicator sleeve, a decent squeegee. Wet the glass, pull the squeegee in overlapping strokes, wipe the blade between passes, detail the edges with a dry microfibre cloth. Work out of direct sun so the water does not dry before you do. Follow that and your ground-floor glass will look properly clean — not nearly clean. There is no trade secret hiding behind the price of a professional visit.
The kit costs one trip to the hardware shop and lasts for years. So here is the honest verdict, from a company that sells window cleaning: if your home is single-storey, the windows are easy to reach, and you do not mind the work, DIY is a defensible choice. We would rather say that plainly than pretend a squeegee needs a licence. The ledger only turns when the house — or the calendar — stops cooperating.
The gap is water, not effort
The professional difference starts with the water itself. Pros run purified, deionised water through water-fed poles. Stripped of dissolved minerals, it dries spot-free with no squeegee needed — and the pole delivers it to second-storey glass from the ground. Tap water from a garden hose does the opposite: every mineral it carries stays on the pane as it dries. It is why upstairs windows washed from a hose can look worse afterwards than before. Different water, different result.
Then there is height. A ladder against second-storey glass turns a mindless job into a careful one, and careful is slow. Most DIY window routines quietly resolve this the same way: the upstairs glass does not get done. That is not a criticism. It is just where the ledger starts leaning — the windows you can see from the street are usually the ones you cannot reach from the lawn.
Tracks, screens and the hours nobody budgets
Clean glass sitting in grimy tracks reads as half-done, because it is. The tracks, the frames, the flyscreens — this is the slow part of the job, and the part most tutorials skip. Screens come off, get brushed and washed and dried, and go back on. Tracks get vacuumed and wiped until the slider runs quietly again. On most homes, the glass itself is maybe a third of the work. The fiddly perimeter is the rest.
Which brings us to the real currency: a Saturday. A modest single-storey home done properly — both sides of the glass, tracks, screens — is most of a day the first time, and a solid half-day once you are practised. Price your weekend however you like; the number does not need to be large before the ledger tightens. DIY is cheap in dollars. It has never been cheap in Saturdays.
The prices, so the trade is explicit
Schmick window cleaning starts at $150. Most single-storey homes land between $150 and $550, priced by window count — more panes, more money, no mystery. Two storeys adds about 40%, which is what the poles, the purified water and the extra time actually cost. Those are real numbers from our live price book, not a teaser rate that grows on arrival.
If the windows are part of a bigger clean — gutters, a house soft wash, the driveway — bundling services on one visit saves 5-15%. And if you would rather never think about it again, the Schmick Plan runs from $89 a month. Plenty of clients split the difference: they keep a squeegee for the ground floor between visits and hand us the height, the tracks and the calendar.
Run your own ledger
The DIY question was never really about skill — the technique is learnable in an afternoon. It is about whether purified water, second-storey glass, finished tracks and a reclaimed Saturday are worth the gap between a hardware-shop bucket and a professional visit. That is a personal sum, and it only works with your actual number in it, not a from-price on a website. Every house counts its windows differently.
So get the number. Schmick's instant quote returns a firm, bookable price for your home in about 60 seconds — window count in, dollar figure out, and it holds unless the place is materially different from what you told us. Put that figure next to your Saturday and do the maths honestly. If DIY still wins, keep the squeegee with our blessing. If it does not, you know where we are.