Deep Cleaning in Smethwick

One cooker and one bathroom shared by several households

Smethwick’s byelaw terraces were built as small single-family houses and a great many now hold two or three separate households, so one cooker takes everybody’s frying and one bathroom takes every shower. Grease climbs the wall behind the hob and hardens on the extractor canopy, and grout and silicone in a bathroom that never gets a few dry hours goes black along the joints. Smethwick is in Sandwell, on hard South Staffs water, so scale comes with the rest: cooking fat, body oils, soap scum and mould growing where those stay damp. Front room sills are their own small job, since the window is a metre from the traffic.

• One kitchen and one bathroom absorbing two or three households in a house designed for a single family
• Extractor filters in shared kitchens that are rarely taken down between tenancies
• Black joints in grout and sealant, in bathrooms that never get long enough between showers to dry out
• Hard South Staffs water, so the film on the shower screen is body oils and soap scum with scale bound up in it
• Void resets ordered by a landlord or an agent before the room is shown to the next tenant

Picture rails first, then the shared kitchen

We go top down and dry before wet, which matters in a low-ceilinged terrace where the picture rails are still up and carrying years of dust. Then the kitchen, which is the job. Filter out and into a degreasing soak, the outside of the canopy degreased, oven interior and door glass done, and the wall behind the cooker cleaned rather than smeared. Bathrooms go back to the grout line and the sealant is given dwell time instead of one hopeful pass. Rooms are cleaned individually where the house is let by the room, because each one is a separate letting with a separate person’s deposit riding on it.

• Filter taken out and soaked, never just degreased in place, which makes the biggest difference in a shared Smethwick kitchen
• Floor protection laid from the doorway inward, because the front door opens onto the pavement with no path or porch to lose grit on
• Grout and silicone treated and left to work, not scrubbed once and rinsed off while still wet
• Each let room handled as its own unit, with the shared kitchen and bathroom done in one uninterrupted block

More detail on the equipment and the order of work: how we do deep cleaning, step by step.

Resets on the Cape Hill and Windmill Lane terraces

The need is concentrated in the dense streets either side of Cape Hill and Windmill Lane, with less of it in the 1930s semis running towards Bearwood and the post-war blocks put up on cleared works land. There is no season to it: rooms in B66 come up all year, so the reset is ordered whenever one does. Parking decides how the morning goes. Tell us the street when you book and we will pack so everything comes in on one trip.

The oven, the extractor and the shared bathroom move the price

Condition drives the price far more than bedroom count, and here the two things that move it most are the oven and the extractor. After that it is how many people have been sharing the bathroom and how far the mould has travelled into the sealant. Where a landlord or an agent is paying we quote the property as it stands and say clearly whether the room needs an hour or the day, because nobody wants to argue about that at four in the afternoon. A quote should hold, so we would sooner lose a job at quoting stage than argue over the invoice. Photographs of the kitchen and the bathroom are enough for a fixed figure.

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At each room changeover, or yearly for an owner

A Smethwick multi-let wants one at every room changeover, which on a house let room by room can mean two or three a year without the property ever standing empty. An owner-occupied terrace off Windmill Lane sits on the ordinary rhythm of once a year, usually spring. The semis towards Bearwood are the same. None of it needs a standing arrangement: a deep clean gets booked when the kitchen has got beyond whoever is living with it.