Kennels, runs, group play floors, grooming salons and relief areas — cleaned to a documented sanitation routine, with a signed log after every visit. Our crews never handle your animals.
Book a walkthroughPet boarding and daycare cleaning is a different job from office cleaning and a different job from clinical cleaning, and the buildings that get it wrong usually get it wrong by borrowing a specification from one of those two. A boarding facility takes in unrelated animals of unknown vaccination status, mixes them on a shared floor, houses them overnight in enclosures they eat and toilet in, and hands them back to owners who will judge the whole business by what the lobby smells like. Zusashi Maintenance has cleaned commercial and clinical buildings across the Greater Toronto Area since 2007, and this page sets out exactly how a boarding kennel, dog daycare or grooming salon is scoped — including the parts we decline.
Most operators know that Ontario has animal welfare law. Fewer know how directly it speaks to cleaning. The Provincial Animal Welfare Services Act — the PAWS Act — came into force on 1 January 2020 and is enforced by Animal Welfare Services within the Ministry of the Solicitor General. Among the basic standards of care it sets for every animal it covers are sanitary conditions and adequate and appropriate ventilation. The province’s own worked example of what the sanitation standard means in practice is removing faeces and other waste regularly, so that animals can move in a clean area free of things that could injure them or make them sick.
The part that surprises people is the inspection power. Where animals are kept for commercial purposes — which a boarding kennel, a daycare and a grooming salon all are — a provincial animal welfare inspector may enter and inspect the premises, anywhere except a home, without a warrant, to determine compliance with the standards of care. There is no appointment in that sentence. Failing to meet an applicable standard of care is an offence under the Act, and the penalty range runs to two years in jail, fines of up to $130,000 against an individual on a first offence or up to $500,000 against a corporation, and a lifetime ban on animal ownership. Orders and decisions are appealable to the Animal Care Review Board within ten business days.
What that does and does not mean for a cleaning contract. The standards of care bind the owner or custodian of the animals. That is the facility. It is not, and cannot be, the cleaning company — so we will never describe what we sell as “PAWS-compliant cleaning”. No such product exists, and a vendor offering it is telling you something about the vendor.
What actually helps when an inspector arrives unannounced is being able to show a routine rather than describe one. We clean it, and we hand you the paperwork: a signed log after every visit recording the date, the areas, the products with their DIN numbers, the contact times, and who did the work. Yours to keep on file. In our experience across regulated verticals, the documentation is the gap far more often than the cleaning is.
It is worth being precise about why, because the difference drives everything else. A veterinary practice generally sees one patient at a time, holds that patient’s medical history, and controls the room between appointments. A daycare puts thirty unrelated animals onto one floor for eight hours, and it usually does not know which of them is incubating something. The clinic’s problem is contamination between rooms; the boarding facility’s problem is a shared environment with continuous mixing, and a population that changes daily.
The other difference is physical. A clinic is a hard-surfaced, low-shed environment. A boarding facility generates hair by the bagful, urine and faeces on floors rather than in fixtures, food waste, saliva on every toy and bowl, and standing water wherever runs are hosed. If your site also has a clinical wing, that belongs on our veterinary clinic cleaning specification, which is written around exam rooms, surgery, isolation and the College of Veterinarians of Ontario’s facility expectations. We will scope both for one site; we will not pretend a single sheet covers them.
Product selection in this vertical is not a preference. Three organisms set the requirement, and each one defeats a different shortcut.
Non-enveloped — it has no fatty coat to strip — so it survives alcohols and many ordinary quaternary products and persists in the environment for months. This is the organism that makes the label claim non-negotiable. Puppies and unvaccinated animals carry the risk.
A fungus, not a worm. Its spores travel on shed hair and skin scale, so the decisive step is mechanical: get every hair out of the room before anything wet goes down. Then a product carrying a fungicidal claim. Zoonotic, so it is a staff exposure too.
Canine infectious respiratory disease spreads by aerosol as well as by surfaces. Cleaning reduces the surface and equipment share and nothing more. Any contractor promising to stop kennel cough with a mop is overselling, and we would rather say so up front.
Two rules follow from all three. First, clean before you disinfect, every time. Disinfectants are inactivated by organic matter, and a kennel is made of organic matter; spraying product onto a soiled run consumes it against the soil and leaves the surface beneath untouched. Second, respect the contact time. A disinfectant that is wiped dry in twenty seconds has not done the thing its label describes. Both failures are invisible, which is precisely why they persist.
We use Health Canada DIN-registered products, matched to the claim your facility needs rather than one product used everywhere, and we record which product went where at what contact time. If your veterinarian has set a product policy, we work to theirs. We are happy to supply the product list and the safety data sheets before a contract starts, and you should ask that of any bidder.
Bleach is a legitimate, cheap and widely used kennel disinfectant, and there is one rule attached to it that a boarding facility cannot afford to be casual about. Never apply bleach to a run that still has urine in it. Sodium hypochlorite reacting with the ammonia in urine releases chloramine gas — in a small enclosed space, at floor level, frequently with a staff member kneeling in it. Clean and rinse first, then disinfect. Our crews are trained on this and it is written into the kennel task sheet rather than assumed; our guide to using bleach safely sets out the chemistry, and our commercial bleach disinfection guide covers dilution and storage.
No other building type on this site produces hair in this volume, and an office specification has no line for it. Hair blinds floor drains and tub traps, wraps vacuum brush bars until the machine stops picking up, coats HVAC returns and dryer grilles, mats into the corners and coving of runs, and rides on air currents into every room including the one where food is prepared. It also carries fungal spores and allergens with it.
So it gets named explicitly in the scope: drain and trap clearing, dryer and vent grilles, ledges and door tops, the underside of the grooming table, the back of the tub, the corners of every run and the gap behind the kennel banks. It is unglamorous and it is most of the difference between a facility that reads as clean and one that does not.
Kennel smell is mostly ammonia, produced as the urea in urine breaks down, and it settles at floor level — which is exactly where the animals are breathing. It is also the first thing a prospective client notices, before they have looked at a single kennel.
The reason a run can be washed every day and still smell is that ordinary detergents lift the visible mess and leave the uric acid residue behind. Enzyme cleaners digest that residue rather than covering it, which is why they are in the specification for runs, relief areas and any porous or previously saturated surface. Air freshener layered on top does two unhelpful things: it masks the signal you need in order to find the source, and it adds another airborne irritant to a room whose ventilation is already working hard. Adequate ventilation is separately a named standard of care in Ontario, so a persistent ammonia problem is not purely a comfort question.
| Area | What the work actually is | Typical frequency |
|---|---|---|
| Kennels, suites and runs | Emptied by your staff first. Waste removal, physical clean of floor, walls, gates, coving and drains, rinse, then disinfect to full contact time. Bedding and bowls to your laundry and wash routine. | Daily, plus on turnover |
| Group play floors | Waste removal through the day, full clean and disinfect between groups or at end of day, walls and gates to nose height, toy and equipment wash. | Daily, often twice |
| Grooming salon | Hair removal first — floor, tub, table, dryer, grilles, traps — then clean and disinfect with a fungicidal claim. Tools and blades stay with your groomers. | Daily |
| Reception, retail and lobby | Glass, counters, seating, floors and the entrance mat system. The room your reputation is decided in. | Daily |
| Food prep and med room surfaces | Surfaces, sinks, fridge exteriors, bins and floors. We do not prepare food or handle medication. | Daily |
| Laundry and utility | Lint and hair control, machine exteriors, floors, drains, and the hair trap nobody else reaches. | Daily to weekly |
| Staff rooms and washrooms | Full washroom routine with a Bill 190 record, plus staff areas. | Daily |
| Relief areas and entrance apron | Waste removal, rinse and enzyme treatment on hard surfaces; seasonal pressure washing. | Daily, with seasonal deep work |
| High-level and periodic | Vents, returns, light fittings, ledges, wall washing, and floor restoration on sealed concrete or epoxy-coated floors. | Scheduled into a quiet week |
Floors in this vertical are usually sealed concrete or a coated system, and they take a beating from urine, enzyme cleaners and daily wet work. We clean and maintain coated and polished-concrete floors as part of the routine — see floor maintenance — and where a coating has failed and needs re-laying, that is installed through a certified flooring partner rather than by our own crews. We will tell you which of the two you are looking at.
A boarding schedule is not an office schedule. There is no empty building at 7pm: the animals are still there overnight, which is the entire product. So the work is built around your movements — runs cleaned as groups go out to play or relief, play floors done between groups, grooming after the last appointment, deep work scheduled into the quiet weeks rather than the March break and the two weeks before Christmas when you are at capacity.
Because our crews never handle animals, that coordination is the contract. We agree with you who empties what and when, and the log records which runs were cleaned and which were skipped because they were occupied — which turns out to be one of the more useful things a manager can see, because a run that is always occupied at cleaning time is a run that is never being cleaned properly.
Overnight boarding kennels and pet hotels, dog daycares and off-leash indoor play facilities, cat-only boarding, grooming salons both standalone and attached, pet retail with a grooming or daycare wing, and rescue and adoption centres. Across Toronto, North York, Scarborough, Etobicoke, Markham, Mississauga, Vaughan, Brampton, Richmond Hill and Oakville. Insurance certificates, WSIB clearance and screening details are available before any crew is on site — ask for them, from us and from anyone else you are considering.
A run-by-run record with a contact-time column and an animal-observation line — and a box for the runs that were occupied and could not be cleaned.
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