Two old towns and everything that grew between them
Alvarado is the oldest settled corner of this part of the county, and it has the housing to match — small older homes on generous lots, some of them held by the same family for two or three generations. Decoto, on the other side, is the other original town, and it is similar in age but tighter: narrower streets, smaller frontages, houses that have been added to over the decades rather than rebuilt.
What both of those neighbourhoods share is the thing I actually plan around: multi-generational households. A house with grandparents, parents and kids in it is not dirtier than any other house — it just gets walked on two or three times as much. The soil goes deeper into the pile, the traffic lanes are wider and more defined, and a light surface clean genuinely will not touch it. Those homes want proper dwell time on the pre-spray and more extraction passes, and they want honest expectations about a lane that has been walked for fifteen years.
The other thing older Union City housing brings is carpet on top of hardwood. It turns up regularly in Alvarado and Decoto, and it changes the method entirely: much tighter moisture control, because water that gets past the carpet and pad into a wood floor will cup the boards and mark the finish. If I lift a corner and find wood, I will tell you before I start rather than after.
In between the two old towns sits the newer city — the tracts built out from the 1970s onward and, more recently, the condos and townhomes clustered around the BART station and along the Decoto Road corridor. Those are the opposite job: two or three storeys, hard flooring downstairs, and carpet confined to the stairs and bedrooms. The stairs are the whole job in a home like that, and they are priced as stairs rather than folded into a room count that does not apply.
A city organised around a train
Union City BART is the reason a lot of people live here, and it sets the rhythm of the whole town. If you are on the train, your evening is not flexible: you get in when the train gets in. And if you drive the 880 instead, you are not walking through the door before six either.
That is precisely the gap I built the schedule around. Weeknights 6pm to 9pm, Saturdays from 3pm, Sundays from 8am — normal hours at normal prices, not an after-hours premium. In practice a Union City booking usually looks like this: you text me the room count during the day, I confirm a 6:30 start, and you meet me at the house straight off the train. Yes, I really do work at 7pm on a Wednesday — that is the entire point of the business.
Drying time
Budget 4 to 6 hours with airflow, and a little longer in the older Decoto and Alvarado homes, where smaller rooms and less air movement slow things down. Ceiling fans or a cracked window at both ends of the house make a real difference. If your carpet sits over hardwood, I will use less moisture and tell you plainly to keep the fan running overnight.
Union City pricing
| Service | Price |
|---|---|
| Minimum service call | $189 |
| Per room, deep steam cleaning | $75 |
| Hallway | $35 |
| Staircase | $75 |
| Whole Home Package — 3 rooms, hallway free, deodorizer free | $299 |
| Each additional room after 3 | $75 |
| Sofa or upholstered piece | from $125 |
| Area rug, cleaned on site | from $50 |
In a busy multi-generational house the whole-home package is almost always the right call, because the free hallway is the surface that needed it most. If there is a wool rug in the front room — and in Decoto and Alvarado there very often is — adding rug cleaning to the same visit costs the rug price and nothing else. Every job is confirmed with an exact quote before anything comes off the truck.
Where I work in Union City
Every street on this map is inside the service area — no travel charge anywhere in Union City.