Deep Cleaning in Sherwood Rise

Deep Cleaning for Sherwood Rise homes

A flat that has been let four times in six years, never reset. The time goes on the kitchen fitted into a bedroom, the shower cubicle in the corner, and the original sash boxes where a decade of road dust has settled in the tracks.

These are booked either by a landlord resetting a flat that has turned over several times without one, or by somebody who has just bought into a conversion and wants the previous tenancies off it before the furniture arrives. The backlog collects in the places a conversion creates. Where a stud wall was dropped in to split a room, the original cornice runs into it and stops, and that ledge above head height has never been reached by anyone. The sash boxes hold years of road dust off the hill. The bathroom went into a corner, so its extractor pulls through a duct that turns twice before it finds outside air and has long since stopped moving much. We work top down and put the hours where the conversion put the dirt.

Sherwood Rise sits in NG7, under Nottingham City Council. The housing here is mostly large three storey Victorian villas and bay fronted semis on the slope, most of them long since divided into self contained flats, with a run of smaller terraces at the lower end, and that is what shapes this job more than the floor area does.

What we run into on Sherwood Rise deep cleaning jobs

Radiators tell you how long it has been. In a converted flat they tend to be single panel, fitted when the building was split, hung tight to the wall under a window in a room with a high ceiling. Warm air carries dust up the back of the panel, it sticks to the fins, and the top edge grows a felt that no vacuum nozzle will reach. Getting it out means a long radiator brush down each channel with something underneath to catch what falls, then the skirting behind. It is slow, and it is the reason a room smells different afterwards rather than only looking better.

How a Sherwood Rise deep cleaning job actually runs

A deep clean is a long day with machines in it, and in a shared building it has to be planned around the people below you. Floors in these conversions are the original timber, so a vacuum or a hard floor machine carries straight through a lath and plaster ceiling. We put the noisy work in the middle of the day and the quiet detailing at either end. Water and power are the other constraints. There is rarely an outside tap available, so everything fills at your kitchen sink, and older conversions run few sockets per room, which means one extension lead used sensibly rather than several machines loading the same circuit. Bring the date forward if the flat is going to be empty, because working around furniture and a household in a small conversion adds hours to the same list of tasks. Clear the worktops, windowsills and floors first, agree in advance whether the oven and the window interiors are included, and give us one space to stack what comes out of the cupboards.

Who books it here

Almost every large house has been cut into flats, so the front door opens onto a staircase that four or five households use and none of them own. That common hall is where the dirt collects, and it is usually nobody's job until a letting agent asks.

We run Sherwood Rise on the same round as Carrington, Forest Fields and New Basford.

What we check on every Sherwood Rise job

Converted kitchens are almost always built into a chimney breast, and the alcoves either side hold the real backlog. A cooker or a fridge slid into a recess leaves a finger width gap on each side, too narrow for a mop and too tight to move without lifting the appliance clear, and what has collected down there is a hard mix of grease and crumbs that comes off in layers rather than in one pass. The breast itself is usually boxed in and painted, so the board above the cooker carries a grease film that shows the moment you clean half of it. We do the whole face or none of it. Below, thin vinyl laid straight over old boards has opened along the seams and at the doorway joint, and those dark lines are liquid that soaked in years ago rather than dirt sitting on the surface, which is worth saying before anyone expects them to disappear.

What the deep cleaning covers

A sample of what is included

• Bathrooms: Toilet including hinges, base and behind the pan
• Bathrooms: Shower head soaked or bagged with descaler
• Kitchen, which is about 40% of the time: Sink, taps, plughole and overflow descaled
• 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.