Deep Cleaning in Sherwood

Deep Cleaning for Sherwood homes

High ceilings, picture rails, coving and door tops, none of which are in a weekly clean and all of which show in the spring light. Sherwood deep cleans are usually booked because someone finally looked up.

This is the service Sherwood houses actually need, and the reason is vertical. A room with a three metre ceiling has a picture rail, a run of coving, a ceiling rose, a pendant on a long drop and a door whose top edge is well above eye level, and none of it is reachable without a step ladder set up and moved around the room. On a three bedroom terrace off Mansfield Road that is comfortably a couple of hours on its own before anybody opens the oven. We allocate that time explicitly rather than hoping it fits, and we work strictly downwards, because whatever comes off a picture rail lands on the skirting and whatever comes off the skirting lands on the floor.

Sherwood sits in NG5, under Nottingham City Council. The housing here is mostly Victorian and Edwardian terraces and semis running off Mansfield Road, with larger detached houses toward Woodthorpe, and that is what shapes this job more than the floor area does.

What we run into on Sherwood deep cleaning jobs

Coving in these houses is painted plaster with a deep profile, and after a century of repainting the detail holds dust in a way that resists a cloth. We take it with a soft brush and a vacuum rather than damp dusting, because a damp cloth on a distempered or heavily painted moulding turns the dust into a smear which then dries into the profile and is far harder to shift than it was to begin with. Where a ceiling rose has cable running through it, we dust around the aperture rather than into it.

How a Sherwood deep cleaning job actually runs

This is a whole day booking rather than a morning, and it is worth deciding in advance which rooms actually get it, because a full period house done properly is often two days or two cleaners. The order is set by the ladder rather than by the rooms. We set up in a room, take everything above shoulder height in one pass, work down, and only then move on, since carrying a ladder back into a finished room means doing that room twice. Original boards make that harder than it sounds. They cup and spring, so the feet go on a board or a folded sheet to keep the stiles level and to avoid pressing marks into a stripped floor. Alcove shelving either side of the chimney breast and the cupboards built in beside it are the reason a ladder often cannot stand where you want it, and those rooms run longer as a result. Bookings cluster in late winter and early spring, when low sun through a tall window shows every ledge at once, then again before Christmas.

Who books it here

High ceilings, picture rails and coving, which means the high level dusting in a deep clean genuinely needs a step ladder and time allocated to it.

We run Sherwood on the same round as Mapperley, Arnold and New Basford.

What we check on every Sherwood job

The bathroom decides how long the day runs. In these houses it is usually a converted bedroom or a room over the back addition, carrying the same tall ceiling as the rest of the floor with an extractor sized for a modern one, which means it never clears the volume of air sitting above the shower. The result is a band of black spotting on the ceiling and the top of the wall that people take for dirt and attack with bathroom spray. We lift it where it is surface growth on sound paint, and where it has gone into the paint film or into the sealant we say so, because that is redecoration rather than cleaning. Elsewhere the checkable items are the sash pulley covers, the tops of the picture rail hooks, the switch and socket surrounds, the upper edge of every door lining, and the extractor cover itself, which unclips and is almost always worse on the inside than the outside.

What the deep cleaning covers

A sample of what is included

• Everywhere else: Skirting boards by hand throughout
• Kitchen, which is about 40% of the time: Inside, on top of and underneath all cupboards
• Bathrooms: Toilet including hinges, base and behind the pan
• Kitchen, which is about 40% of the time: Oven interior, racks, side runners, door glass and grill pan

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.