Deep Cleaning in Attenborough

Deep Cleaning for Attenborough homes

Solid walled cottages and interwar houses on a floodplain, where the annual reset starts at floor level rather than at the ceiling. Skirting, understairs cupboards and the backs of ground floor rooms carry more than the same rooms would half a mile inland.

A deep clean here begins low rather than high. Ground floors in the village sit close to the water table, and the bottom half metre of every room shows it: skirting that has swelled and lifted slightly from the plaster, a chalky line on painted brick in the understairs cupboard, and a faint tide of dust bonded into a surface that is never quite dry. That gets lifted dry, with a soft brush working ahead of the vacuum, and only then is it treated, because going in with a cloth first turns it to a smear. Above that it is the ordinary annual list, though the cottages add their own items: beams that shed grit when disturbed, small casement windows with deep reveals, and cupboards built into the thickness of the wall.

Attenborough sits in NG9, under Broxtowe Borough Council. The housing here is mostly older cottages and larger period houses in the conservation area around the church, interwar and postwar semis along Attenborough Lane and Barratt Lane, and a little later infill toward the water, and that is what shapes this job more than the floor area does.

What we run into on Attenborough deep cleaning jobs

The houses that have taken floodwater at some point are the ones with the most to find, and they are not always obvious from the front. Look for sockets set high on the wall, a hard floor downstairs in a house that has carpet everywhere else, and a horizontal joint in the plaster where the wall was cut back and made good. Behind kitchen kickboards in those houses there is usually fine silt still sitting in the corners, because the boards were clipped back on and nobody has had them off since. We take them off, vacuum, and say what we found rather than putting them back quietly.

How an Attenborough deep cleaning job actually runs

A deep clean here is quoted from what is in the house rather than from its floor area, because the village stock runs to tall rooms, deep skirting, picture rails and staircases with turned spindles, and every one of those items is measured in time. Booking one means giving up a full day of the house rather than a morning. We want the heating on, because a cold room slows every drying stage and puts the finish back; we want somewhere to stack what comes out of cupboards, since these houses rarely have a spare room to use as a staging area; and we want to know in advance about a loft hatch, a high shelf or a light fitting you would like reached, so the right steps come on the van rather than being improvised from a kitchen chair. Appliances are the other half of the day. An oven, a hob extractor and a fridge seal each take proper time, and they are best confirmed at booking rather than added on the morning, because they change the finish time and every other room is planned around it.

Who books it here

Open water comes right up to the southern edge of the village, and the air here stays damp longer than it does a mile inland. That shows as green film on frames, render and paving, as slower drying indoors, and as condensation in the older solid walled cottages well into spring.

We run Attenborough on the same round as Chilwell, Beeston and Toton.

What we check on every Attenborough job

Radiators are where a deep clean earns its name in these houses. Above almost every one there is a soft grey plume on the wall, sometimes stopping neatly at a picture rail, which is household dust carried up on the convection current and deposited on cool plaster. It is not a mark you scrub, because on emulsion scrubbing burnishes the paint and leaves a shinier patch than the stain. It gets lifted dry first, then treated gently and evenly across the whole panel of wall so nothing shows as a patch. Behind the radiator itself, and particularly behind the old cast iron column type, dust felts into a mat that a vacuum head cannot reach and a duster only pushes further in. That needs a long flat brush worked downwards with the vacuum held below, and it is a job for before the floor is done rather than after.

What the deep cleaning covers

A sample of what is included

• Bathrooms: Toilet including hinges, base and behind the pan
• Kitchen, which is about 40% of the time: Fridge and freezer emptied, defrosted and washed including the seals
• Everywhere else: Window interiors, sills, frames and the tracks they run in
• Bathrooms: Shower head soaked or bagged with descaler

That is a sample rather than the whole list. The full deep cleaning page sets out every section of the scope, what is deliberately excluded and why, how long it takes on each property size, and what tends to go wrong.