Westminster, from a cleaner's point of view
Two things about this city shape a cleaning route. The first is that the housing is uniform and small: single-story, three bedrooms, one or two baths, built in a rush between about 1955 and 1968 on lots that leave a few feet between neighbors. The second is that the commercial heart of Little Saigon sits right in the middle of it, so Bolsa Avenue, Brookhurst and Magnolia are congested from mid-morning while the residential blocks a street away are empty.
So we schedule Westminster by street rather than by clock, grouping visits off the arterials and keeping the crossings to a minimum. Inside the houses the pattern is consistent too. Compact kitchens that get heavy daily use, tiled entries, small bathrooms with original fixtures in a good share of them, and a lot of properties where an extended family shares the space. Short distances, tight rooms, and a visit that is more thorough than large.
The building stock here
Typical square footage is 1,000 to 1,500 on a 5,000 to 6,000 foot lot, single-story, slab, with an attached garage and a small rear yard. Wall furnaces and original bathrooms still turn up. Newer construction is limited to a few condo and townhome developments and some infill along the boulevards. Nothing here is far from the coast, so morning marine layer keeps humidity up and mildew shows in poorly vented bathrooms.