Deep Cleaning in Toton

Deep Cleaning for Toton homes

An annual reset in a house that has been improved in pieces. The hours go on what those improvements left behind: boxed pipework, the void behind a bath panel, the space above the wall cupboards and the plinth nobody has lifted.

A deep clean here is largely a job of finding what several decades of partial improvement left behind. New units get fitted against walls that were never straight, so the gaps are closed with scribes and packers, and each one leaves a channel down the side of a tall unit or along the end of a worktop run. They fill with crumbs and grease and nobody has had them open. Pipework gets boxed in when a bathroom is redone, and the boxing is rarely removable, so the top of it becomes a permanent shelf at about eye level. Radiators have been swapped at least once and the brackets moved with them, leaving old fixing marks and a gap behind that no sweeping brush ever reached. That is where the hours go in a Toton deep clean, not on the floors.

Toton sits in NG9, under Broxtowe Borough Council. The housing here is mostly 1950s and 1960s semis and short terraces on the estates off Stapleford Lane and Swiney Way, with later cul de sac development and newer closes filling in between them, and that is what shapes this job more than the floor area does.

What we run into on Toton deep cleaning jobs

Bath panels are the specific one. In a house of this age the bath usually sits in a boxed alcove with a panel clipped or screwed on at the front, and in a fair number of properties that panel has not been off since the day it went on. Behind it is the trap, the overflow pipe, whatever has gone down the side of the bath over the years, and quite often the offcuts from the original fit. It comes away in a couple of minutes with a screwdriver and goes back the same way. We ask first rather than discovering afterwards that someone siliconed it in.

How a Toton deep cleaning job actually runs

A deep clean is a day, sometimes more, and it has to be planned around the household rather than dropped into a normal round. Water and power both get used heavily, so we ask that the hot water is on and that we know whether it comes from a combination boiler or a cylinder, because a cylinder empties and then everybody waits for it to recover. Most houses on these estates have one bathroom, so that room is done in a single continuous run early in the day rather than left to the end, and anyone at home is told when it is out of use. Furniture gets moved and put back, which needs floor space somewhere, so each room is cleared into the next and the sequence works round the house instead of jumping about. Waste is the last practical point. A deep clean produces bags, and a household collection will not swallow them all at once, so we take away what will not fit rather than leaving it stacked beside the bin.

Who books it here

Estate houses of a certain age reach the point where the kitchen, the bathroom and often the back of the house get replaced within a few years of each other. That is why builders work sits alongside the regular rounds here rather than turning up as an occasional job.

We run Toton on the same round as Chilwell, Attenborough and Stapleford.

What we check on every Toton job

The airing cupboard is the one place in these houses that everybody uses and nobody cleans. In a property of this age it is a tall cupboard off the landing or the bathroom with slatted wooden shelves and a hot water cylinder standing in the bottom, and the slats are there so warm air can move up through the linen. What actually moves through them is fabric fibre. It comes off towels and bedding, drifts down through every slat and settles on the cylinder jacket and the boards beneath, where the steady warmth mats it into a grey felt that lifts away in sheets. There is nearly always a thicker layer around the immersion boss and behind the cylinder, where a hand cannot reach. Shelves come out, the boards are vacuumed with a crevice tool before anything damp goes near them, and the linen goes back to a cupboard that has stopped smelling faintly of dust.

What the deep cleaning covers

A sample of what is included

• Everywhere else: Window interiors, sills, frames and the tracks they run in
• Bathrooms: Shower head soaked or bagged with descaler
• Kitchen, which is about 40% of the time: Extractor hood and filter, degreased or replaced
• Everywhere else: Skirting boards by hand throughout

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.