Deep Cleaning in Clifton Village

Deep Cleaning for Clifton Village homes

The annual job is the fabric a fortnightly visit is not allowed near. Folding shutters come out of their boxes, secondary glazing panels come off, and the recesses behind cast iron radiators get emptied, all of it dry work before anything wet.

A deep clean here is defined by the things a regular visit is not allowed to disturb. Folding shutters are the obvious one. Where they survive they live in boxes either side of the window, they have not been closed in years, and the box holds everything that has drifted into it since. Secondary panels come off so the trapped faces can be reached. The recesses behind cast iron radiators, which stand further off the wall than a modern panel does, get emptied with a soft brush and suction rather than a cloth. None of this is heavy work and all of it is slow, because every item is original, nothing is a standard size, and the risk to manage is not that something ends up dirty but that something ends up damaged.

Clifton Village sits in NG11, under Nottingham City Council. The housing here is mostly listed and period property round the church and the hall, from small cottages to substantial houses in walled grounds, with twentieth century infill dropped in between them, and that is what shapes this job more than the floor area does.

What we run into on Clifton Village deep cleaning jobs

The kitchen in these houses is usually in the back range, in what was the scullery, and the cooker very often stands in the opening where a range once sat. That opening still has a flue above it. Capped at the top in most cases, and open at the bottom, so the void above the cooker draws warm greasy air up into it and keeps it, and the underside of whatever bridges the opening carries a soft dark film that no surface clean reaches, because nobody looks up into a recess. The sill under the back window, stone or brick, worn hollow in the middle, holds water after wiping and has to be dried rather than left.

How a Clifton Village deep cleaning job actually runs

A deep clean needs somewhere to put things, and that is the first thing these houses do not have. Rooms are small, there is no garage, and the loft is reached by a hatch rather than by stairs, so whatever comes out of a cupboard has to go into the next room and then come back again. We therefore work one room at a time and finish it, instead of stripping a whole floor out at once, which looks slower on paper and is much faster in the house. Light is the second problem. Windows are small, reveals are deep, and the mature trees around the church and the green keep front rooms dim well into the afternoon, so we bring our own lighting. A surface that reads as clean by the window is a different surface under a lamp held at a low angle. Drying then governs the order of the day. Ventilation is whatever the windows give you, so wet work goes in first thing and the rest of the visit is dry work while the air does its part. On a damp still day we say so and move the wet items.

Who books it here

Conservation rules decide more here than the age of the houses does. Original windows stay, so nobody has traded small panes for a sealed unit; walls are soft brick and stone in lime mortar that a pressure lance opens up; and nothing may be fixed to an elevation, which rules out permanent fittings.

We run Clifton Village on the same round as Clifton, Wilford and Ruddington.

What we check on every Clifton Village job

Ceilings in these rooms often carry a set of faint dark stripes running the same way across the full width, evenly spaced, with paler bands between them. People book a deep clean specifically to get rid of them. They are not dirt in the ordinary sense. The timbers behind the plaster are colder than the voids between them, and over years the fine soot and dust in the room settles by preference along those cold lines, printing the structure of the ceiling onto its face. Above a radiator the same thing happens in a fan shape up the wall. Washing takes a little of it away, leaves the rest, and it comes back in exactly the same places, because the cause is the temperature of the surface rather than anything sitting on it. So we tell you what it is, take off what will come off with dry sponges, and leave the remainder to a decorator, since paint is what actually answers it.

What the deep cleaning covers

A sample of what is included

• Kitchen, which is about 40% of the time: Oven interior, racks, side runners, door glass and grill pan
• Bathrooms: Limescale removed from taps, shower head, screen, tiles and grout
• Everywhere else: Window interiors, sills, frames and the tracks they run in
• Kitchen, which is about 40% of the time: Washing machine drawer, door seal and filter

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.