Deep Cleaning in Bakersfield

Deep Cleaning for Bakersfield homes

Houses fitted out in instalments, a kitchen from one decade and a bathroom from another, with boxed pipework hiding the joins between them. A reset here is mostly about those joins, because that is where grease and dust settle and stay put.

These houses were modernised in instalments rather than all at once, and a deep clean is largely an argument with the joins. A kitchen fitted in one decade meets a wall that was never straight, so there is a finger wide gap at the end of the run and another behind the cooker, both of them full. Pipework boxed in when the heating went in sits behind a casing that lifts off, and nothing behind it has been touched since. The bathroom sits over the hall with the immersion cupboard beside it, and the slatted shelves in there shed lint onto clean towels. Those places come first, because the visible surfaces in a house like this are usually fine and the hidden ones carry everything.

Bakersfield sits in NG3, under Nottingham City Council. The housing here is mostly 1930s semis and blocks of four in long curving roads off Oakdale Road, council built with deep gardens, alongside private bay fronted semis of the same decade and pockets of later infill, and that is what shapes this job more than the floor area does.

What we run into on Bakersfield deep cleaning jobs

The bath panel surprises people. In most of these bathrooms it is screwed rather than clipped, so it has not been off in years, and behind it is the underside of the bath, a drip line from the overflow and a stretch of floor that has never been washed. It takes two screws and a torch. The cooker gap is the other one. A freestanding cooker usually stands in the space left by the old range recess, and the unit sides either side of it carry a soft brown film of grease and dust together, which needs a degreaser and dwell time rather than a spray and a wipe.

How a Bakersfield deep cleaning job actually runs

A deep clean on this estate is a day with the house effectively handed over, and it goes better when a few things are agreed before we arrive. It needs a full working day for two cleaners, so somebody opens up in the morning and then either keeps ahead of us or goes out entirely. It needs hot water and a working kitchen tap: where an outside tap has been isolated for the winter, say so, because filling from the bathroom means carrying water down the stairs all day. It needs a decision about furniture, since the wardrobes and the front room suites in these houses are heavy and the floors are timber. Anything we shift goes on sliders and comes back onto its own marks, and anything that is not to be moved gets pointed out at the start rather than discovered. Most of these bookings arrive with a reason attached, whether that is a sale, a move, a new baby or clearing a relative's house, and the reason changes what gets the hours. Tell us what the real deadline is and we will work backwards from it.

Who books it here

The ground falls away to the south, so the top streets take wind and rain off open country with nothing in front of them, and exterior work gets booked around the weather rather than the diary. Indoors the same house plan comes round every few doors, so the room order is known before we knock.

We run Bakersfield on the same round as Carlton, Sneinton and Colwick.

What we check on every Bakersfield job

The cold corner is where the time goes. In a house of this age, with solid brick gables and bedrooms sitting over unheated space, the corner where two outside walls meet runs colder than the rest of the room, and that is where black spotting appears: down the vertical join, along the top edge of the skirting, and on the plaster reveals either side of the window. It reads as dirt and it is not. It is mould growing on condensation, and going at it with a general purpose spray spreads spores across clean plaster. It gets treated wet with a fungicidal wash, left to dwell, then taken off without scrubbing the surface open. Behind a wardrobe standing flat against that same wall the back panel is often damp and furred, and once we have moved it out we leave it a hand's width off the wall, because that gap is what stops the growth returning.

What the deep cleaning covers

A sample of what is included

• Bathrooms: Extractor vent, cabinet interiors, mirrors and chrome
• Kitchen, which is about 40% of the time: Hob, including underneath the burner caps
• Bathrooms: Shower head soaked or bagged with descaler
• Everywhere else: Radiators, including between the fins and behind

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.