Window cleaningin Boca Raton, FL.

Royal Palm Yacht & Country Club's 749 original home sites mostly front the water or the golf course, and Por La Mar sits on the Intracoastal too. Waterfront homes there tend to put their largest glass toward the view: slider walls, floor-to-ceiling panels and French doors onto the pool deck.

Salt settles on that glass as a thin, sticky film that holds dust and scatters the light, so the view looks hazy in the afternoon. It is washed and squeegeed by hand, frames and sills wiped because they hold salt too, and tracks brushed and vacuumed so heavy sliders run. It returns within months, so water-side glass does best on a three to four month cycle, with the street side on a longer one.

Woodfield and Broken Sound were built from the late 1980s, and where a home there is two stories, it often has an arched transom over the entry and bedroom windows upstairs. From inside they are hard to reach; from outside, a ladder on textured stucco risks marking it. Afternoon sun through an unwashed transom shows every streak inside the foyer.

From the lawn, the water-fed pole's soft brush scrubs that glass and the purified rinse dries clear. Any transom the pole cannot reach over a roof section is flagged in the quote. Both communities are gated, so the guest list comes first. Ground-floor glass and the sliders onto the pool are done by hand, and screens are washed and refitted.

Boca's IRIS reclaimed-water system serves about 1,600 customers, and a sprinkler head that throws reclaimed water on the glass leaves mineral rings as it dries. Do that on every watering day for a few years and the spots etch in. Light-colored window frames show the mineral rings as well.

New spots wash off in an ordinary clean. Etched spotting needs a mineral remover, pane by pane, and some only lightens. Before quoting, Michael tries the remover on a single pane. Turning the heads so they water the beds and not the house is what keeps the lower panes clean between visits. If your village's association runs the irrigation, ask them to adjust the heads nearest your windows. Screens are washed too.