Commercial Cleaning in Olton

One original bathroom serving a whole office of staff

In a converted villa office the failures are concentrated and predictable. The washroom gives way first, because sanitary provision sized for one household is now taking a working day, and the extract fan and the floor around the pedestal show it before anything else does. The kitchen follows, since a scullery with one small sink becomes the place where a whole office makes lunch and washes up in a hurry. The hall and stair take the traffic that a purpose-built lobby would have absorbed, and on a wet Monday the first three metres of an encaustic tiled hall carry the whole day. On top of that the fabric sets limits: tiled halls, waxed boards and painted joinery will not take the strong alkaline and the scrubbing machine that suit a modern vinyl floor, and one wrong visit removes a finish that took years to build. On the parades the driver is simpler, being a doorway that opens straight onto the Warwick Road and shows a week of pavement traffic in a day.

• Converted villa offices where one original bathroom now serves a whole staff and gives way before anything else
• Tiled halls, waxed boards and painted stair joinery that a scrubbing machine and a strong alkaline will strip
• Scullery kitchens now doing the work of a staff kitchen, with one small sink and a fridge nobody owns
• Consulting and treatment rooms wanting a between-appointment standard, well above an ordinary office one
• Shop and agency doorways opening straight onto the Warwick Road, where the threshold and the mat do all the work
• Landlords and managing agents on the older roads asking to see an insurance certificate and a method statement before access is granted

A product and method policy before any task list

The first document is a product and method policy, written before any task list, naming which floors stay dry, which timber takes pH-neutral only, and which surfaces we will not touch at all. That is the difference between a converted villa keeping its floors and losing them. Our visits run within Monday to Friday 8am to 6pm and Saturday 9am to 6pm, and an 8am start usually has a practice or office done before the first client arrives, so nobody sits in a reception while a mop goes past them. Confidential waste is left alone and reported, since a sack of paper from a solicitor’s office is not general waste and a cleaner should not be the person deciding that. On the older roads, entrance steps and thresholds are cleaned by hand with no pressure washer, which is what old stone and tile need.

• A written product and method policy naming the floors and joinery that stay dry or take pH-neutral only
• Confidential waste left in place and reported, since it belongs to your own secure disposal arrangement
• Practices cleaned from an 8am start ahead of the first appointment, with treatment rooms done to your own protocol
• Entrance steps and thresholds on the older villa roads cleaned by hand, never pressure washed
• Insurance certificate on request, and a method statement agreed with the landlord or managing agent before a first visit

More detail on the equipment and the order of work: the full commercial cleaning process.

Parades, practices and villas in use as offices

The trading work sits along the Warwick Road parades and the roads immediately off them, close to Olton station, with the offices on the floors above. The converted villas are on the older roads, including St Bernard’s Road, Grange Road and Kineton Green Road, and the Kineton Green and Olton Mere side carries heavy mature tree cover that puts leaf and grit through a front door every autumn whatever the matting is doing. Access here is unusually easy for commercial work: wide plots and in-and-out drives mean a vehicle can sit on site, off the bus route, and there is somewhere to bring equipment in without crossing a shop floor or a waiting room. Olton is about twenty-two minutes from our Selly Oak base, so an 8am slot before a practice opens is straightforward to keep.

Small rooms, a staircase and treatment-room standards

Floor area is a poor guide to a converted house. A villa is a set of small rooms, a hall and a staircase, and that takes noticeably longer than the same area of open-plan office, so a quote based on a plan alone tends to look good on paper and prove wrong within a month. We walk round first. The other drivers are the number of washrooms, how often we attend, whether consumables are supplied with the contract, and how much hand cleaning the joinery and internal glazing need. Practices with treatment rooms carry more time than an office of the same size because the standard is different and the recording is real. Periodic work sits outside the regular visit and is quoted separately: hard floor treatment, a full kitchen reset, internal glass and partitions. Where a landlord holds several suites in one building, they can be specified and quoted together on one schedule and one invoice.

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Daily for practices, two or three mornings for villa offices

Practices with appointment lists mostly need daily attention, with the clean placed at the start of the day before the first session. Offices in the villas usually sit on two or three mornings a week, with washrooms and the kitchen on every visit and the rooms themselves rotating. Parade shops manage on weekly, though the doorway and the lower glass want more than that if you front the Warwick Road directly, where pavement traffic and slow-moving vehicles are a few feet away. Meeting rooms are better cleaned after use than on a rota. Hard floor treatment in a converted house, meaning stripping and resealing or rewaxing, is an occasional booking, not a weekly item, and it pays to do it properly and rarely.