Window Cleaning in Mapperley Park

Window Cleaning for Mapperley Park homes

Three storeys of sashes, dormers in the roof and a leaded stair window at the half landing. The stair window is the one to be careful with: old lead flexes, so pressure on the pane is what cracks it.

There is more glass on one of these houses than on three terraces, and it sits at three different heights. The ground floor bay is several tall sashes side by side, the first floor repeats them, and the top floor adds dormers set back into the roof slope. Then there are the landing windows, one at each half landing, frequently with coloured or leaded glass in the upper light. A first clean here takes considerably longer than the second, because sash frames that have not been touched in years hold debris in the bottom rail and around the horns, and all of that has to come out before any water goes on. Otherwise it simply washes down the pane and dries as streaks.

Mapperley Park sits in NG3, under Nottingham City Council. The housing here is mostly large late-Victorian and Edwardian villas on wide plots, red brick with stone dressings and deep bays, a good number now divided into flats, and almost nothing built small, and that is what shapes this job more than the floor area does.

What we run into on Mapperley Park window cleaning jobs

Leaded and stained panels want a different hand from plain glass. The came is soft, the panel has usually bowed a little over a hundred years, and pressure applied flat against the middle of one is what cracks a piece or opens a solder joint, so the work goes from the edges inward with support behind wherever it can be reached. Water is dried off rather than left to sit, because it collects in the channel of the came and encourages the whitening on the lead. Old cement putty crumbles, and if a panel rattles we say so instead of working it harder.

How a Mapperley Park window cleaning job actually runs

Most of the work is outside the house, so the perimeter decides whether a round runs smoothly. These plots are generous, walled and heavily planted, and the usual obstacles are a locked side gate, a shrub bed under a bay that cannot be stood in, mature trees overhanging a rear elevation, and a narrow passage between the house and a boundary wall that has become where the bins live. We would rather walk the outside once with you at the start and note where a pole can be set up than discover it with a guest arriving. Water comes from the vehicle, though an outside tap saves time on a large elevation and is worth pointing out. Nobody needs to be home for the outsides, which is what makes a regular round workable, but gates have to be unlocked and dogs kept in, since a cleaner leaving a side gate open once is a serious problem in a house with a dog. Insides are booked separately by appointment, usually two or three times a year.

Who books it here

The local reference points are Mansfield Road, Woodborough Road, Mapperley Road, and the conservation area streets around Private Road, which is usually enough for us to find a property without a postcode lookup.

We run Mapperley Park on the same round as Mapperley, Sherwood and St Ann's.

What we check on every Mapperley Park job

The elevations here do not weather at the same rate, and it is the trees that cause it. A rear or north facing wall shaded by a mature sycamore or lime stays damp for most of the day through winter, so the glass grows a fine green algae film and the frames go green at the joints, while the sunny front of the same house is only carrying road film. Algae does not come off with a wipe: it needs the glass wetted, left a moment and then worked, and the frame and the rubber or putty line worked as well or it returns within weeks from the edge inward. The other place it starts is the drip groove under a stone or concrete sill, which stays wet long after the glass has dried and seeds the whole pane again from below. Gutter overflow above a shaded elevation does the same in a narrower stripe, and that one belongs to whoever clears the gutters rather than to the glass.

What the window cleaning covers

A sample of what is included

• Interior: Glass washed, squeegeed in a single continuous pass and buffed dry
• Also: Green algae on north-facing frames
• Exterior: Drainage holes at the bottom of the frame cleared, which otherwise block and let water pool inside
• Also: Conservatory roofs and glazing

That is a sample rather than the whole list. The full window 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.