First Aid For The Grungiest Of Bathrooms

Wendy Soberg says clean commodes are tough to come by.

So when the Spokane resident left the nursing profession last year, she started her own janitorial service that blasts bacteria, sanitizes sinks and gets grout gleaming - but only in bathrooms.

“How many times have you gone into a restaurant or a gas station, then went to the bathroom and thought, ‘My God, this is disgusting!”’ said Soberg, president of Strictly Bathrooms Inc.

Starting at $15 a week, Soberg and her crew will clean and disinfect any type of restroom - from the sparkling powder room of a five-star eatery to the squalorous water closet of a run-down gas station.

Soberg, who doesn’t describe herself as a neat-nick but merely as “someone who enjoys a clean house,” runs the home-based company with her husband, daughter and son-in-law.

Soberg is confident the company fills an undiscovered niche: Only about half of the Spokane janitorial agencies clean bathrooms - and none scrupulously sanitize and disinfect them as Strictly Bathrooms does, she said. (During her last job, Soberg scraped mildew from light fixtures with a tooth brush.)

Soberg isn’t the first to hop on the bathroom bandwagon. An East Coast franchise that specializes in cleaning bathrooms grossed $25 million last year, she said.