Paint, hair and floor wax keep Ohio State facilities crews busy over the summer

Armed with a pair of needle-nose pliers, Anthony Navarro flipped over a desk chair inside an empty dorm room and began fiddling with its casters. He plunged the pliers into one of the wheels and began twisting and pulling. With the tug of his wrist, Navarro excavated a clump of blonde hair from the casters.

"No one wants to see that on move-in day," said Andrew Crow, senior director of operations at Ohio State University.

It's one of the many unseen but important jobs that members of Ohio State's operations crew are tasked with each summer. Navarro is one of 250 custodial workers across campus whose work doesn't end when students leave after finals are over.

In many ways, it's just the beginning.

'Turning' spaces starts as students move out

From spring commencement in May to move-in day in August, custodial workers have about 45 days to clean, maintain, restore and refurbish some 19,000 spaces across the Columbus campus, Crow said.

That includes residents' rooms, hallways, entryways, stairwells and common spaces, to name a few, all of which are occupied during the school year. While the campus isn't completely empty throughout the summer, Crow said fewer people on campus gives the facilities crews the time and space to do their work before students return for the fall.

It all starts in the final few weeks of spring semester, as students are daydreaming about their summer plans.

"Move out is rough," said Aubrie Smith, who manages the logistics and implementation team for Ohio State's Facility Planning & Design department. "It's the kick-off to summer turn."

"Turning the rooms" begins with students packing up and cleaning their rooms, Crow said.

Those first two weeks after students move out, custodial teams stay in the building they're assigned to during the year to do an initial clean. The vast majority of students do a great job, but it's the 5% who don't, Crow said, that make up 95% of the facilities crews' work.

In the worst cases, custodial workers find horror scenes in some rooms. The worst sight Crow ever witnessed was an all-black shower curtain and bathtub covered in mold.

But in many cases, it's smaller nuisances that lead to a lot of work.

LED strip lights, made popular by TikTok influencers, can turn the plain white walls of a dorm room into a vibe. But the double-sided tape or adhesive strips used to hang them up are a nightmare to remove, Crow said. About 80% of the paint work done in dorms is to patch walls after removing tape, he said.

Or take the hair caught in the wheels of desk chairs like what Navarro removed.

Crow said hair caught in wheel casters is one of the most annoying tasks because there is no simple way to remove it. Custodial workers have tried using razor blades, paint strippers, even fire to remove the hair. They looked into simply replacing casters with too much hair, but Crow said that price tag would've run Ohio State about $300,000 a year.

So they make due. (Navarro said he finds pliers to get the job done best.)

"It's all the little things you'd never think of on move-in day," Crow said.

"The success of summer turn determines the success of move-in in the fall," he added. "We want the rooms to be pristine."

Restorative work at residence halls takes time

Beyond cleaning rooms, Ohio State's facilities crews also use the summer months to do restorative work in some of Ohio State's buildings.

Crow said the university has a mix of newer and older dorms, so the facilities crew gets to about a third of the residence halls each summer for updates.

Restorative work includes jobs like resurfacing walls, replacing fixtures and waxing floors.

At Busch Hall on Ohio State's North Campus, custodial workers Eric Craft and Carl Johnson swept and mopped rooms in preparation to redo the floors.

Craft, who has worked at the university for 27 years, said it takes about an hour to do each room and each person is assigned six rooms a day. With six floors of residences' rooms in Busch Hall, he said it will take custodial crews about four days to completely clean the hall.

Some residence halls, Smith said, are a quicker turn because they're used for summer school and freshman orientation. Others are rented out to conferences and summer camps.

"It's a game of Tetris," Crow said. "It's a giant puzzle that we make work."

Sheridan Hendrix is a higher education reporter for The Columbus Dispatch. Sign up for her Mobile Newsroom newsletter here and Extra Credit, her education newsletter, here.

shendrix@dispatch.com

@sheridan120

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Ohio State facilities crews deep clean dorms over the summer