At Eagle’s View Window Cleaning, John Day cleans up to five stories of glass from the ground
John Day, a Marine veteran and former rural mail carrier from Idaho, cleans Tulsa homes and low-rise buildings by himself with purified water and a long pole.
Tulsa, OK
Once a year, ahead of the Tulsa Drillers’ home opener, John Day cleans the glass at ONEOK Field. He does not rent a lift for it. He works from below with a water-fed pole, a long pole with a hose running up it to a brush, and scrubs and rinses windows far above his head.
The Drillers have been his customer since the mid-2010s. Day owns Eagle’s View Window Cleaning, and he has worked the same way since he started the business in 2012: by himself, from the ground.
Eagle’s View is a one-man company. Day gives the estimates and cleans every pane. He tried hiring twice. “My first guy didn’t last too long, and the other guy lasted like two weeks,” he says. After that he settled it: “Never mind. I’ll just do it myself.” He knows a window company can grow fast by hiring crews. One employee was trouble enough, he says. “I was never chasing the high dollar.”
Day grew up in Boise, Idaho. He spent a year in Japan with the Marine Corps, and he carried mail on a rural route in Idaho for 10 years. In the early 1990s he built computers on the side, until Gateway and Dell made the side business not worth his time.
He moved to Tulsa and took temp work. “I really don’t want to get back on with the post office,” he remembers thinking. Then, he says, “window cleaning kind of fell in my lap.” He started out mowing lawns and washing windows. Between the gas and the wear and tear on the equipment, the lawns did not pay enough to keep going. He dropped them and kept the windows.
From the start he was choosy about which windows. The trade has a kind of work it calls route work: strip malls, fast-food restaurants and the small shops clustered around big-box stores, cleaned on a set route for a low price per pane. Day never took it on. “All I did was low-rise commercial up to five stories and residential,” he says. “That’s it.”
Most of his outside work uses what window cleaners call pure water. The water runs through a pre-filter, a sediment filter, a carbon filter, reverse osmosis and deionization until the dissolved minerals are stripped out. Then it is pumped up the pole and out of jets on the brush. He scrubs the glass, frames, tracks and sills, then rinses. There is no squeegee. Water with nothing in it dries without spots. “Windows stay cleaner longer, because it leaves no film behind,” he once wrote.
He has also written that it takes more than water and a brush to get a clean window. “I know window cleaning,” he says. “I’ve learned it. I do it all the time. I know how to deal with the issues.”
Inside a house he uses a nontoxic window soap in a spray bottle instead of a bucket, so there is nothing to spill on a customer’s floor.
The pole reaches the third story of a house. On commercial buildings he will go to five stories, though he mostly sticks to four and under. The fifth story is harder, he wrote, especially when it is windy. Staying on the ground is the point. A lift has to be rented, dropped off and picked up, and it can tear up the landscaping. He figures he can often clean a whole four-story building for about what the rental and delivery fees alone would cost. From below he can also shift his approach around parked cars and shrubs. “This is not a nose to glass cleaning,” he wrote. He credits the pole with keeping him free of accidents and property damage.
His commercial customers have included hotels, assisted-living centers, offices and the Jenks school district. For a realty company at Lewis and 44th, he cleans two of its three buildings, and each one takes him two and a half to three days. He paces himself. When it is very hot he takes one house a day. When it cools off he can do two, depending on the size of the house.
He will drive for the right job. He once went two hours to McAlester to clean a newly built house. “I will go farther out based on a referral,” he says.
Over the years, he says, half or more of his new customers have come by referral. “You build the relationship with the people, you do extra, you do certain things, they recommend you,” he says. One customer started with a yearly cleaning, moved to twice a year, then to three times, and recommended him to a couple of people.
Most of his residential customers book him twice a year, and many stay for years. On a list of longtime customers he once kept, a customer from 2013 and a glass chapel he started cleaning in 2014 were both still on his schedule in 2020. A Broken Arrow customer, Linda G., wrote to him after a cleaning in 2014 that her windows were “so clean you would swear there is not glass between you and the outside.”
He prefers to handle all of it in person. “I just been operating old school,” he says. “I just do it face to face with my customer.”
In 2013, describing how he finishes a job, Day wrote that he checks every window before he moves on, then walks all the way around the property when he is done. “But I am human,” he wrote. “So that is why my guarantee is in place.”