Deep Cleaning in Sparkhill

Four cookers under one roof in a subdivided Sparkhill villa

Subdivision is what creates the work in Sparkhill. Four cookers in one house means four hoods, and in a licensed let nobody has ever taken a filter out to look at it. The kitchens themselves are cheap fits dropped into rooms that were never plumbed or vented for cooking, so extraction is poor and the grease stops being a film and becomes a layer you can mark with a fingernail. Shared bathrooms behave the same way: an extractor fan that is decorative, five showers a day off one cubicle, and mould living permanently in the sealant. At that point wiping surfaces achieves nothing, and a landlord paying for a wipe-down is paying twice.

• Four or five cookers and hoods inside one subdivided building, with filters that have never come out
• Kitchenettes fitted into former reception rooms, vented badly or barely vented at all
• Shared bathrooms running showers all day behind a fan nobody has ever heard working
• Soft Welsh reservoir water means the film on a Sparkhill shower screen is body oil and soap, never scale
• Takeaway and restaurant kitchens along the Stratford Road wanting a degrease booked in before an inspection, not after one

One let finished before the next door opens

In a subdivided house we finish one let completely before opening the next door, because four half-stripped kitchens leave a landlord with nothing to show anybody. Hood filters go into a hot degreasing soak while we take back the hob surround, the wall behind the cooker and the cupboard doors that catch the splashback. Ovens are done inside, glass included. Bathrooms are worked to the sealant line rather than over it. Communal stairs, the hallway and the bin store come last, once we have stopped carrying kit up and down through them.

• One let finished at a time, so the building is never left as four partly done kitchens
• Filters lifted out into a hot soak while the hood, splashback and cooker gap are stripped by hand
• Mould given dwell time in the sealant instead of a scrub and a rinse that looks better for a fortnight
• Communal stairs, hall and bin store cleaned at the end, after the traffic through them stops

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

Strip-backs on the subdivided villas behind the high street

The residential half sits on the villa roads running back off the high street, and on the terraces towards Sparkhill Park, where the larger houses have taken the most subdivision. The commercial half sits on the high street itself and is done in the morning, before the kitchens get busy. Both are about twenty minutes from our Selly Oak base. Parking is the real constraint: frontages here are dense with almost no off-street space, so we unload at the door and move the van straight away.

Kitchens and bathrooms, not bedrooms, set a B11 strip-back price

Bedroom counts mean very little in this area. What we price on is how many kitchens and bathrooms sit inside the building and what state they are in, so a five-let house that has been kept up can come in under a three-let house nobody has properly cleaned since the licence was granted. Ovens and hoods are the biggest single variable, mould depth in the sealant is second. Pricing is built for repeat work, and a landlord is better served by two modest strip-backs a year than one enormous one every three years. Photographs of each kitchen and bathroom get you a fixed figure.

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At each changeover and before a licensing inspection

A shared kitchen used by four or five separate lets realistically wants a strip-back twice a year, and the sensible points are whenever a room changes hands and again before a licensing inspection is due. Communal stairs and bathrooms sit on the same cycle. Commercial kitchens on the Stratford Road are different: quarterly is the realistic minimum for a busy one, and the fast-food end of the strip does better monthly.