Meet the Owner

Aloft Cleaning Service

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The Story Behind Chicago's Only High-Reach Cleaning Service

How one loft, one persistent odor, and one very tall ladder led to a whole new kind of clean.

Every Aloft client asks us the same thing sooner or later: "How did you even think of this?" The honest answer is, we didn't set out to start a cleaning company. We just couldn't find anyone who could get rid of a smell.

A Loft, a Move, and a Mystery Smell

It started when our founder, Marty Romme, helped his brother move into a stunning new loft in Printer's Row — the kind of space every Chicago loft-lover dreams about. Seventeen-foot ceilings. Exposed brick. Original beams and ductwork. Dramatic drop lighting. Floor-to-ceiling windows.

A professional cleaning crew came through and did a great job on everything at floor level. But something still wasn't right — a faint, stubborn, musty smell that just wouldn't go away.

Looking Up (Because No One Else Would)

Marty went looking for a company that specialized in cleaning those soaring, hard-to-reach spaces. He called around Chicago. He came up empty every time. A service like that simply didn't exist.

So he climbed a ladder himself with a duster and got to work. Hours later, the odor was gone — but the mess it left behind told the real story. Years of dust, dander, and debris had been quietly settling into every beam, duct, and brick joint since the building's industrial days.

"It was scary and shocking to see how much came down. If it can build up unseen for years in one loft, it's happening in thousands of them."

A Better Way, Built From Scratch

That experience became the blueprint for Aloft. We knew a real solution had to check three boxes:

• Safe — no one should have to stand on a tall ladder reaching overhead to get their home clean.
• Thorough — dust and debris shouldn't just fall onto your furniture and floors.
• Healthy — cleaning should capture allergens, not send them right back into the air you breathe.

We researched, trained, and invested in professional high-reach tools and HEPA-filtration vacuum systems built specifically for this kind of work — so every high-reach clean and window washing job we do happens safely, from the ground up, with the dust actually captured instead of scattered.

Why It Matters for Your Home

Here's something most people don't know: household dust is mostly made up of shed skin flakes — and dust mites, one of the biggest year-round triggers of allergies and asthma, feed on exactly that. Now picture years of it collecting on the beams and ductwork above your head.

You probably can't see it from the floor. But it's there. And what you can't see can still affect how you and your family breathe every day.

That's the gap Aloft was built to close — for the loft-lovers of Chicago, and for anyone who's ever looked up and wondered what's really up there.