Valley Cleaning Services in Vinton keeps its evenings for the kids

Stephanie Teruel will clean a house or an office, and she says she does not much mind which. She does have a preference, and it comes down to showers. “I do like offices more, ‘cause they don’t have showers,” she says, “so it’s a more quicker in-and-out clean.”

Teruel owns Valley Cleaning Services in Vinton, Virginia, and has run it since 2020. The business keeps daytime hours, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the people who work it have a reason for that. “All of the people that work for me and myself are moms,” Teruel says, “and this is what we do to be there for the kids in the evening.”

That one fact explains most of how the company is built. Teruel tries to answer every customer the same day, on the crew’s lunch break or once she gets home in the afternoon. After that the day belongs to her family. “I just have kids, so the evenings are with them,” she says.

The crew is small and flexible. Teruel works alongside one regular employee, and two more women come in when there is enough work. On a full schedule she can have as many as six people out on jobs. “There’s technically only three of us at the moment, because the other ones are as needed,” she says. The company writes that it sends only as many people as a job needs, and in practice that means the roster grows and shrinks with the bookings.

The work is split between homes and businesses. On the commercial side, the company has cleaned office buildings and a factory building. An office visit covers the trash, the vacuuming and mopping, the bathrooms and the kitchen. For a time, its accounts included the studios and offices of 101.5 The Mountain, a radio station that serves Roanoke and the New River Valley. One staff member wrote in a 2022 Google review that Teruel kept the station reminded of its cleaning schedule, and that the staff looked forward to cleaning day because they knew the workplace would be left clean and gleaming.

House cleaning comes in two weights. A basic clean covers dusting, vacuuming, mopping, the bathrooms and the kitchen. A deep clean adds the baseboards, the ceiling fans, the inside of the refrigerator, and the stove and oven. The company also shampoos carpets, washes bedding and clothes, and hauls away unwanted items. Most of the regular houses are on a weekly basic clean, and those customers still book a deep clean once a year, Teruel says. She also keeps a discounted rate for seniors.

The company’s photo gallery, mostly from 2021 and 2022, shows a different kind of job. Some pictures show apartments with clothes, boxes and bags across the floor. Others show rooms of the same kind emptied out, with bare carpet, wiped counters and refrigerators standing open after cleaning. The company’s Better Business Bureau listing names move-out, post-construction and estate cleaning among its services.

The territory runs well past town. Valley Cleaning works in Roanoke and Salem and out into Botetourt, Bedford and Franklin counties, and for the right job the crew will drive an hour. “We go all the way to Clifton Forge,” Teruel says.

---

The company gives free estimates, and Teruel goes out to look at a place before she prices it. What she wants now is a bigger company. “My vision honestly is to just get it to grow to where I can have other people working and just checking in on it,” she says.

Growth also matters for the women on call, whose hours depend on how full the book is. “It’s very important to keep everybody busy and working and meeting their goals with their family,” Teruel says. When the work picks up, so does the crew. “If I pick up more work, of course, they come back,” she says, “as they always do.”