Deep Cleaning in Thorneywood

Deep Cleaning for Thorneywood homes

The annual jobs here sit against the cold wall where the ground is banked up outside: wardrobe backs, the boxed-in stairs cupboard, and skirting that has been behind a sofa nobody can move alone. All of it wants doing wet rather than dry.

Deep cleans get booked here in the autumn, and the reason is the wall the ground is banked against. Where a house is cut into the slope, one ground floor wall has earth behind it to roughly waist height, and it stays cold right through the summer. Anything standing hard against that wall, a wardrobe, a bookcase, boxes stacked in the back room, traps still air behind it, and the household dust that settles there goes to a paste that a vacuum will not lift. A deep clean is the visit where that furniture actually comes away from the wall. We work the skirting and the plaster wet, dry it properly, and leave a gap behind the furniture when it goes back.

Thorneywood sits in NG3, under Nottingham City Council. The housing here is mostly late Victorian and Edwardian terraces built in short runs across the slope, some standing a storey above their own pavement and others dropping below it, with interwar semis on the higher ground, and that is what shapes this job more than the floor area does.

What we run into on Thorneywood deep cleaning jobs

The stairwell wall is the other piece of the house that never gets cleaned, because there is no floor under most of it. From the bottom step to the ceiling above the landing is two storeys of plaster in one drop. What is on it at the top has been there since the house was last decorated: cobwebs in the corners, dust on the picture rail that has felted rather than stayed loose, and a pendant light fitting hanging in the void that is usually the dirtiest in the property. It gets a pole and a dry head first, then wet, and any platform used on a staircase has to sit level on the treads before anyone stands on it.

How a Thorneywood deep cleaning job actually runs

A deep clean in one of these houses is planned around the parts of it that are not really rooms. Most have a cellar reached by a narrow flight from the hall or the kitchen, cut into the hillside rock, with one bulb and often no socket. We bring our own lighting and we work from the top of the flight down, because carrying anything up those steps with full hands is how people get hurt. We need to know beforehand what is stored down there. A cellar used as a store is cleared by you, not by us, and a cellar with a working meter or a stopcock in it needs a clear path to both. Above ground the same principle applies to the space under the stairs, the loft hatch and the old coal grate set into the front path. Book a full day where the household can be elsewhere, keep the water on, and let us open the sequence from the top of the house rather than the front door inwards.

Who books it here

The gradient decides the job before anyone gets inside. Front doors sit at the top of a flight of steps, back gates open onto a bank rather than a level path, and equipment is carried up or down rather than wheeled. We build that into the time rather than finding it on the day.

We run Thorneywood on the same round as St Ann's, Sneinton and Porchester.

What we check on every Thorneywood job

Cellar walls here are usually bare rock or brick with a coat of limewash on them, and both shed. Run a cloth along a sandstone face and it comes away orange, because the rock gives up fine sand continuously and the floor below is where that sand ends up. Limewash comes off just as readily and leaves a chalky white smear on anything damp. The mistake is to treat those walls like plaster and wash them. Wetting them draws salts to the surface, and a week later you have a white crystalline bloom where the wall was clean. So the cellar gets a dry method: vacuum with a fine filter working downwards, brush loose material off the ledges before it is disturbed by anyone walking through, then a damp pass on the floor only. Anything stored down there wants to sit clear of the walls on a rack rather than flat on the floor.

What the deep cleaning covers

A sample of what is included

• Bathrooms: Limescale removed from taps, shower head, screen, tiles and grout
• Everywhere else: High level dust: light fittings, door tops, picture rails, coving
• Everywhere else: Carpet edges, which a normal vacuum pass misses
• Kitchen, which is about 40% of the time: Fridge and freezer emptied, defrosted and washed including the seals

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.