We finished a kitchen reno in the spring and I figured a good vacuum and a couple of hours would sort out the mess. Three weeks later I was still finding a fine white film on the top of the door frames. Here's what I actually learned about construction dust, in case you're about to go through it.
Drywall dust is basically powder, not dirt. It's ground so fine it stays airborne for hours after you stop working, then settles into places you never wipe — vents, light fixtures, window tracks, the tops of doors, inside closets. A normal clean just stirs it back into the air, which is exactly why it kept "coming back" for me.
One pass is never enough. The whole point of a proper post-renovation clean in Scarborough (or wherever you are) is that it's done in multiple passes — you let the air settle between them, otherwise you're just relocating the dust. That was the part I got completely wrong doing it myself.
Your vents will keep re-dusting the whole house. If drywall dust got into the returns, your HVAC will happily redistribute it every time it kicks on. When I finally had a crew do a proper post-renovation clean in North York at my brother's place, the vents were the first thing they went after — and his dust problem stopped immediately. Mine dragged on for a month because I ignored them.
Paint and adhesive don't come off with a wipe. Splatter on floors, glass, and fixtures needs to actually be scraped and solvent-treated. It's fiddly and it's the reason post-renovation cleaning in Markham and everywhere else gets quoted per square foot instead of flat — the dust load and the mess vary wildly job to job.
Contractors usually don't do the final clean. Most will do a "broom sweep" and that's it. Read your contract. I assumed it was included and it very much was not.
If you're mid-reno: budget for the cleanup as a separate line item, do it after the last trade leaves, and don't move your furniture back in first. I did all three in the wrong order and paid for it in weeks of sneezing.
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