Deep Cleaning in Shard End

Valley mud through the back door, and a kitchen never taken apart

Two things generate most of the interior work on this estate. The first is the Cole Valley. A great many Shard End houses open straight onto shaded, damp green space at the back, so grit and wet mud come in through the rear door and travel down the hall, and rear rooms that never get sun hold condensation through the winter. The second is ordinary hard use in a small post-war kitchen: grease on the hob wall and the extractor, soap scum in the bath and shower, and mould darkening the grout and sealant. The water here arrives soft off the Elan Valley, so scale plays no part in any of it.

• Mud and grit walked in from the Kingfisher Country Park footpaths, mostly through the back door and along the hall
• Cold rear elevations facing the valley, where condensation gathers in bedroom corners and behind wardrobes
• Small rear kitchens with the extractor directly over the hob, so grease lands on the wall and the cupboard doors either side
• Mould in bath and shower sealant, with no limescale to speak of, because Birmingham water is soft
• Houses being reset for a handover, a sale or a family occasion, where the clean is scoped to what the house actually needs

Dry and top down, then kitchen, bathroom and the back-door route

We go dry and top down before a wet cloth touches anything, then split the house into the kitchen, the bathroom and everything the back door traffic touches. The kitchen extractor filter is lifted out and dropped into a degreasing soak, never cleaned where it sits. Grout and silicone get a treatment and are left to work, not scrubbed once and rinsed. Then the hall, the stairs and the threshold by the rear door, which in a Shard End house carry more of the dirt than any other part of it.

• Extractor filter soaked, with the outside of the hood and the tiles behind the hob degreased separately
• Sealant and grout treated and given dwell time, since the growth is mould and needs contact more than force
• The back door threshold, hall and stairs treated as the dirtiest run in the house, never the last five minutes of it
• Rear windows and frames done from the inside while we are there, because valley-side glass is the first to look poor

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

Where the dirt comes from on a valley-side house

The houses with the most interior work back onto the country park corridor between Shard End Crescent and the river. Front-facing houses on the same street are a different job, with far less carried in and drier back rooms, and we price the two apart. Access is the easy part of working here: wide estate roads, verges and off-street parking mean we unload at the door and are set up in minutes. Demand follows handovers, house sales and family occasions more than any season.

Known layouts, so condition is what moves a B34 price

Uniform house types make this an easier area to price accurately, because the room count and the layout are known quantities and only condition really moves the figure. What moves it is how far the oven and the extractor have gone, how deep the mould has got into the sealant, and whether carpets and the rear rooms want doing too. We are happy to scope a job down to the kitchen, bathroom and hall, and there is no reason to buy a whole-house clean you do not need. B34 is covered on scheduled days, so we will offer you one of those dates.

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An early-spring clean once the park mud stops arriving

Once a year suits most houses on the estate, and the sensible slot is early spring, once the worst of the winter mud off the park has stopped arriving daily. Houses that back the valley and keep a dog often want the hall, stairs and kitchen done again in autumn, which is a smaller and cheaper visit than a full reset. Void and pre-sale cleans happen when they happen, and we fit those into a scheduled B34 day wherever we can.