Planning a Summer Deep Clean in Montreal Buildings
Why July and August are the best weeks of the year to do this work
Most commercial buildings in Montreal see a real dip in occupancy from late June through the end of August. Offices run at a fraction of their normal headcount. Some tenants are out for weeks. Foot traffic in lobbies and corridors drops noticeably. For anyone responsible for maintaining a building, that window is worth using.
What we keep seeing is that property managers and facility teams often let this window pass without taking full advantage. The building gets its regular cleaning, which is fine, but the periodic work that is genuinely hard to do with the building full just does not happen. Then September arrives, everyone is back, and the floor finish is still worn down to bare concrete in the main corridor.
The construction holiday period, roughly the last two weeks of July, is especially useful. Tradespeople are off, which means far fewer people on site, less debris tracked in from building entrances, and more uninterrupted access to floors, stairwells, and common areas. That combination is hard to find at any other point in the year.
What work actually makes sense during low occupancy
The honest answer is that reduced occupancy does not magically make every type of cleaning easier. But it opens up specific categories of work that are genuinely disruptive when the building is full.
Floor refinishing is the clearest example. Stripping and reapplying finish to a vinyl composite tile floor means the area has to be closed off for several hours. Do that in February with a full office, and you are creating a real headache for tenants. Do it in late July when two-thirds of the staff are away, and you can usually work floor by floor with minimal friction.
Carpet deep cleaning is in the same category. Hot water extraction leaves carpet damp for a period afterward, depending on the drying conditions in the building. That is manageable when occupancy is low. It is a complaint waiting to happen when the building is packed.
Other work that fits this window well: thorough cleaning of kitchen exhaust areas in multi-tenant buildings, deep scrubbing of washrooms beyond the regular rotation, cleaning of ceiling diffusers and high surfaces that get skipped during regular service, and attention to storage rooms or service corridors that rarely get proper time.
Window washing is worth scheduling here too, particularly for interior glass. Glass partitions in open-plan offices accumulate months of fingerprints and smudges that nobody notices until the light hits them just right on a fall afternoon.
The difference between regular janitorial service and a periodic deep clean
This question comes up often, and the answer matters for planning. Regular janitorial service keeps a building clean day to day. It covers what needs to happen repeatedly: washrooms, waste removal, vacuuming, floor mopping, surface wiping. That frequency is what prevents a building from visibly deteriorating.
A periodic deep clean is different. It addresses what regular service cannot reasonably handle on a nightly or weekly pass: built-up soil in grout lines, finish degradation on hard floors, soil embedded deep in carpet pile, high surfaces, and areas that are simply out of rotation. Think of it as the maintenance that protects the longer-term condition of the building’s surfaces and materials.
Most buildings genuinely benefit from both. A regular cleaning schedule is not a replacement for periodic work, and periodic deep cleaning does not make regular service unnecessary. They do different things. The summer window is when you bring in the periodic work that has been accumulating since the fall.
How far ahead do you need to book
For straightforward deep cleaning of a single floor or a small common area, a few weeks of lead time is often enough. For anything involving floor strip and wax across multiple floors, or hot water extraction for a large carpet area, earlier is better.
In our experience, bookings for July and August work start filling up in May and early June. The construction holiday weeks in particular get spoken for quickly, because everyone with the same idea is calling around the same time. If you are trying to schedule floor refinishing for late July, calling in late June puts you in a tight spot.
A practical approach is to look at your building’s maintenance calendar in the spring and identify what periodic work needs to happen over the summer. Lock in the scope, get a quote, and confirm the dates before the construction holiday calendar gets crowded. That is not complicated, but it does require thinking a few months ahead instead of a few weeks.
Which areas of a commercial building benefit most from summer deep cleaning
Main lobbies and elevator lobbies tend to hold a lot of accumulated wear that regular service cannot address. Entrance areas take the worst of spring and summer foot traffic, including outdoor debris, pollen, and anything tracked in from nearby construction. Over more than six decades, our crews have seen lobby floors go from looking dull and pitted to genuinely presentable after a proper summer refinishing, and that matters when September brings everyone back.
Washrooms benefit from the kind of deep grout cleaning and fixture descaling that can only be done properly when the building is quiet. The same goes for break rooms and common kitchens, where grease and soil accumulate in places that daily cleaning does not reach.
Stairwells are often overlooked. They get regular attention in theory, but they also get skipped when the crew is tight on time. Summer is when you catch them up properly.
Carpet in meeting rooms and private offices, areas that do not get high traffic but also do not get cleaned as often as corridors, is worth addressing before fall. Embedded soil that sits in carpet all winter is much harder to deal with by the following spring.
A few things most people get wrong when planning this
The most common mistake is treating the summer window as a single event rather than a planning period. The whole summer is not equally accessible. Some weeks have more vacations than others, and some floors are busier than the rest of the building even in July. A good plan accounts for that by phasing the work instead of trying to do everything at once.
The second thing people get wrong is waiting until the building is fully empty before scheduling anything. In most Montreal commercial buildings, that moment never actually comes. Plan around reduced occupancy, not zero occupancy, and you will find much more room to work with.
Coordination matters too. Talk to your cleaning provider early enough that they can put together a realistic scope of work. Floor refinishing, carpet extraction, and high dusting each require different equipment, different crews, and different scheduling. Calling two weeks before you want it done and asking for all three at once is not a recipe for a good result.
At Can-Jan Inc., we have kept Montreal buildings clean since 1961. Reach out to talk about your property.
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