Deep Cleaning in Cradley Heath

Rear-addition kitchens, damp bathrooms and settled floors

The building stock creates the workload. Rear kitchens in these terraces are small, often single-skin additions with one window and an extractor venting straight through the wall, so cooking moisture and grease have nowhere to go except the surfaces around them. Bathrooms were fitted into rooms never designed to be bathrooms and they ventilate badly, which is why mould through the grout and along the silicone is the standard finding in B64, on top of what the water itself leaves behind. B64 is supplied by South Staffs Water, and it is hard water, so scale builds on taps, screens and tiles far faster than soft water would allow. Add older floors that have settled and opened gaps between the boards and the skirtings, and there is a great deal of grit sitting where a mop has never reached.

• Rear-addition kitchens with one window and a through-the-wall extractor, so cooking grease settles on everything in the room
• Bathrooms fitted into rooms that were never planned as bathrooms, ventilating badly and growing mould through the grout and sealant
• Hard South Staffs water, so limescale is part of the job here along with grease, soap scum and mould
• Gaps opened between floorboards and skirtings in older houses whose floors have settled, holding years of grit
• Painted render and old lime plaster indoors, which want low-moisture cleaning and never a soaking

Filters soaked, grout worked back, old plaster only damp-wiped

We work dry before wet, and in a low-ceilinged terrace that goes quicker than it sounds: there is no coving or picture rail on most of this stock, so the dust sits on door tops, the stair string and the boxed-in meter cupboard. Then the kitchen comes apart. Extractor filter out and into a soak, oven interior and door glass, the gap beside the cooker, cupboard carcasses inside and out. Bathrooms are taken back to the grout line. Walls in old painted render or lime plaster get damp-wiped and are never washed down, because water does them no favours at all.

• Extractor filter lifted out and soaked instead of wiped where it sits, which is the single biggest change in a small B64 kitchen
• Grout and silicone given proper dwell time, since mould in a badly ventilated rear bathroom is the usual reason this gets booked here
• Low-moisture wiping on painted render and old lime plaster, with no washing down of the walls
• Vacuum work along settled floorboards and skirting gaps before anything wet goes near them

More detail on the equipment and the order of work: deep cleaning across Birmingham.

One kitchen, one bathroom, a whole household

Most of this work sits in the terraced streets running off the High Street and out towards Haden Hill Park, with the rest on 1950s to 1970s infill and the newer estates put up on old works land. The practical constraint is the van. Narrow frontages and no off-street parking in the old stock mean we unload and then park properly, well clear of the terrace, for the rest of the day. Cradley Heath shares a scheduled day with Blackheath and Rowley Regis, so it is worth booking a little ahead.

Why a B64 two up two down is usually a half-day price

Condition sets the price more than bedroom count does, and in B64 the figures are usually modest because the houses are. A two up two down with a reasonably kept kitchen is a half-day job. What moves it is the oven, how far mould has travelled into the bathroom sealant, and whether the rear addition has been used as a store instead of being lived in. Photos on WhatsApp get you a fixed figure.

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Late winter, once the shaded yard has done its worst

Once a year suits most Cradley Heath households, and late winter is the sensible slot, because a small walled yard and a shaded rear addition keep the back of the house damp from November onwards and the bathroom shows it first. Rented terraces want one at every change of tenant instead. Where a kitchen extractor has never been opened, the first clean is the substantial one and the annual visit after it is short.