Old Houses in Beaufort and Bluffton Need a Different Turnover

Beaufort's old town and Old Town Bluffton have rental stock that predates almost everything else on this coast, and the same features that make those houses rentable make them easy to damage: original heart pine floors, plaster walls, wavy old glass and hardware that has been in place for a century.

A turnover routine designed for a modern house treats all of that as ordinary surfaces, which is where the trouble starts.

Heart pine is softer than it looks

It is old-growth timber, dense and beautiful, and it is still a softwood. It dents under furniture that gets dragged rather than lifted, and it marks under anything abrasive.

The bigger risk is water. Heart pine floors in these houses are usually finished with wax or an old penetrating oil rather than modern polyurethane, and a wet mop is genuinely bad for them — it lifts grain, dulls the finish and can leave a permanent cloudy patch. These floors get dry-dusted and spot-cleaned, not washed.

Owners who hand a guest a steam mop as a courtesy are handing them the single fastest way to ruin the floor.

Plaster is not drywall

Old plaster walls do not take moisture or pressure the way drywall does. Scrubbing a mark can take the surface off with it, and hanging anything new — a hook, a mirror, a fixture — is a job for someone who knows what is behind it.

Marks on plaster are better reported than attacked. A cleaner who tries hard to remove a scuff frequently leaves a worse patch than the scuff was.

Windows and hardware

Original glass is thin, sometimes wavy, and set in putty that has been there a very long time. It gets cleaned gently and never with pressure against the pane.

The hardware is worth the same care. Brass latches, sash locks and door sets in these houses are frequently original, and the coastal air is already working on them. Aggressive cleaners strip what patina is left and can pit the metal outright.

Tell your cleaner before the first visit

Nothing here is difficult once it is known. All of it is invisible to somebody arriving at a property for the first time, who will reasonably assume the floors can be mopped and the walls can be scrubbed.

An owner who says "the floors are waxed heart pine, the walls are plaster, the windows are original" at the start gets a turnover built around that. An owner who says nothing gets a standard one.

Call Savannah STR Cleaning on (912) 666-2994 and mention what the house is made of when you book the first turnover.