End of Tenancy Cleaning in Old Basford

End of Tenancy Cleaning for Old Basford homes

Much of the terraced stock is let by owners with one or two houses rather than through an agent, so the check-in paperwork is often a page or nothing at all. We photograph the finished rooms because there may be nothing else to argue from.

A good share of the terraced stock here is let by people who own one or two houses and manage them themselves, and that changes the check-out completely. With an agent there is a check-in report with photographs and a clerk who inspects against it. With a private landlord there may be a single sheet, a set of phone photos, or a memory of how it looked when you moved in. That cuts both ways: there is less to be marked down against, and there is also nothing to prove what you handed back. So the clean is only half of it. The other half is evidence, and it has to be created at the end rather than found at the beginning.

Old Basford sits in NG6, under Nottingham City Council. Regular fortnightly work in the owner occupied semis, and a steady run of landlord turnarounds on the terraces, a lot of which are rented rather than lived in by their owners. Deep cleans come third and cluster after a sale, when the carpet has come up in an empty house and nobody expected what was under it.

What we run into on Old Basford end of tenancy cleaning jobs

Outbuildings are what get missed. Most of these terraces still have the brick store at the end of the yard, or what is left of it after the back kitchen took half, and if the tenancy included the yard then the store came with it. Cobwebs, a swept floor and the bins washed out is the whole of it. The other one is the meter cupboard by the front door in the semis, which has a door, a floor and usually a pile of leaflets in the bottom. Neither is a big job. Both look like neglect in a photograph, which is what they will be judged from.

How an Old Basford end of tenancy cleaning job actually runs

Timing is what goes wrong on these check-outs. The clean can only start once the van has gone, and in a terrace with no hall every stick of furniture leaves through the front room, which means the room you cleaned first is the room that gets marked last. So we book after the removal rather than around it, and we do the front room and the bottom of the stairs at the end of the day rather than the beginning. The other local factor is the handover. A lot of tenancies here end on the same day the next tenant starts, and a landlord who manages one or two houses himself is often doing the check-out in person on his way home from work. That leaves a narrow window. Tell us the inspection time when you book, not on the day, and we will work back from it. We also need the utilities left on. No electricity means no vacuum and no hot water means no oven left to soak, and both turn a finished job into a returned visit.

Who books it here

A lot of the older houses had the outside toilet and coal store swallowed by a back kitchen at some point, which leaves a cold single-skin room at the rear holding the washing machine, the freezer and the muddy boots. It is routinely the room that costs the most time.

We run Old Basford on the same round as New Basford, Bulwell and Bestwood.

What we check on every Old Basford job

The oven is where most of the time goes, and in this housing stock it is usually a freestanding cooker rather than a fitted double. The enamel liners come out and soak, the shelves and the grill pan soak with them, and the door glass comes apart where the design allows so the film between the panes can be reached. What gets forgotten is the drawer at the bottom, which on a cooker of this age has been used to store baking trays and holds a mix of crumbs and carbon that bakes on every time the oven runs. The hood or extractor above it is the second half of the same job. A metal mesh filter that has never been degreased will drip when it is disturbed, so it comes out and goes in the sink rather than being wiped in place over a hob you have already finished.

What the end of tenancy cleaning covers

A sample of what is included

• Bathrooms: Bath sealant line and overflow
• Kitchen: Hob, extractor hood and filter degreased
• Bathrooms: Toilet including hinges, base and behind the pan
• Kitchen: Oven interior, racks, door glass and grill pan

That is a sample rather than the whole list. The full end of tenancy 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.