When Is Cleaning Not Cleaning?

Bookings
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We charge a $75 cleaning fee, which covers staff time for (among other things) cleaning the bathrooms and other basic stuff. We also have a nothing-left-behind policy: guests can pay to have additional trash (over a “reasonable and customary” amount) picked up. But we do expect–and tell our guests up front–that they will take away everything that they, or their vendors, brought.

Last night we hosted a fairly elaborate event managed by a first-time party-thrower. He had a lot of different vendors (balloon arches and pillars, photo booth, bar, band, food, etc.) and most of them were great. But at the end of the evening I was left with the bases for the balloon arches and pillars. These are heavy (basically buckets filled with cement) and would require a special pickup by our waste management company. The balloon vendor, when I asked her at setup how the balloons were being dealt with, told me that the client would take care of them–but apparently she hadn’t told the client that. I don’t consider an item like thispart of reasonable-and-customary trash pickup OR cleaning.

Does Peerspace have any policy on what clients leave behind? When I have organic (non-Peerspace) rentals our contract is explicit. We’ve tried to do the same with PS rentals, but it has proved more elusive.

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Amend your rules to charge 25$/day storage fee.

Then charge them.

Mine actually says, “items left behind for 15 days will be discarded”

I do a walk thru with the client at the end of the shoot so your problem won’t happen at my studio.

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Probably nothing you can do about it now, but in the future I would charge them immediately for “excess trash”. I have my fee set to $250 as a hard press to keep them from doing it. People will gladly leave junk behind for a small $25 fee.

I have the following in my studio rules:

All trash must go in a studio-provided bag. — These are contractor quality bags, not home use bags. They rip too easily and people always overstuff.

All bags must be under 30lbs. — They could put the cement buckets in the trash bags, but my carting company will not take them if they’re that heavy.

If you do it this way with the “all trash must go in a bag” rule, it limits a clients ability to argue about the individual things themselves. I just tell them that my carting company will not take anything that’s not in a bag (this is true).

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