A Birmingham Cleaning Calendar: What to Do and When

Two things set the cleaning year in Birmingham, and neither of them is habit. It rains on about 132 days out of the year here, about one day in three, and the city holds over a million trees. Between them they decide that exterior work belongs in March and September, that gutters are a late-November job rather than a September one, and that January and February are for the inside of the house.

What actually sets the Birmingham calendar?

Rainfall and frost, first. The Met Office publishes long-term averages for the Winterbourne station at the University of Birmingham, covering 1991 to 2020. They give rain on around 132 days a year, about 42 days of air frost, and December, October and November as the three wettest months in that order. March is the driest of the twelve. That is the shape of the year for anything done outdoors.

Trees, second. The i-Tree Eco survey published by the West Midlands Combined Authority in May 2024 counted 1,129,000 trees, with 15% canopy cover, slightly below the UK average of 16%. Roughly one tree for every resident. You will read elsewhere that the city has more trees than Paris, or six million of them, or 20% canopy. None of that survives contact with the survey, and the real figure is quite enough to fill a gutter.

The species mix matters more than the count. Silver birch is 11.1% of the stock, sycamore 9%, holly 8.3%. Sycamore drops big leaves and winged keys that mat into a plug over an outlet. Silver birch drops fine leaves and seed catkins that break down into a silt which passes straight through mesh and brush and settles in the bottom of the run, which is why gutter guards disappoint people here. Holly is evergreen, so it sheds a little all year rather than in one fortnight.

January and February: the condensation months

This is interior work, and the thing to understand is where the moisture comes from. National Energy Action puts it plainly in its damp and condensation guidance: a family of four adds 30 to 40 litres of water a week to the air just by breathing, 15 to 20 more from showering, cooking, bathing and washing, and 10 to 15 from drying clothes indoors. That is 55 to 75 litres a week looking for the coldest surface in the house, in a city with around 42 days of air frost.

Building standards treat 80% relative humidity at the wall surface as the point at which mould can germinate, and BS 5250 notes that room humidity sustained above about 70% is enough to push a cold external wall past it. National Energy Action recommends 18 to 21 degrees in living areas and every room above 15. Cleaning treats the symptom here rather than the cause, and the joint guidance from MHCLG, the Department of Health and Social Care and UKHSA is explicit that blaming damp and mould on lifestyle choices is unreasonable. Where black growth is in the bathroom silicone rather than on it, cleaning is money wasted and the sealant needs cutting out.

Two scheduling notes. Carpets take longest to dry now, so a January clean wants a low-moisture method rather than a machine that soaks the underlay, and the variables are set out in how long a carpet takes to dry. And January is when next year’s student houses go on the market around Selly Oak, so viewing cleans cluster into the first three weeks of it.

March and April: use the driest month of the year

March is the driest month on the Winterbourne averages, which makes it the month for anything needing a surface that is genuinely dry rather than merely not raining. Jointing sand will not go into a damp joint. Sealer applied over trapped water traps the water.

Indoors, sequence saves more time than effort does: top down, dry before wet, dispersal before extraction, and the reasoning is set out in the right order to do it in. Outdoors, clean the conservatory roof now rather than in autumn, because the point of a clear roof is the summer ahead of you. Left long enough a roof goes from clear to translucent to opaque, and by then the household has usually stopped using the room.

May and June: the exterior season and the Selly Oak fortnight

Patios and drives belong here, on the back of the drier spring. The honest part is what happens afterwards: moss and algae return on a timescale set by shade and drainage, not by how well the surface was cleaned. The Royal Horticultural Society is clear that these growths do not damage the substrate but do make paving, steps and paths slippery, which is the reason worth doing it for. North-facing paving in Northfield rarely gets a dry spell long enough to break the cycle on its own.

Then the compression. Two universities alone account for over 70,000 students here, around 40,000 at the University of Birmingham and around 32,000 at Birmingham City University on HESA’s 2024/25 figures, and the Selly Oak tenancy calendar funnels most house changeovers into the same fortnight in early summer. Six or seven people, one kitchen, joint and several liability on a single deposit, and every cleaning slot in B29 spoken for. In that fortnight the booking is the hard part, not the cleaning, which is the whole point of the June handover.

July and August: moving season, and the fastest drying of the year

Carpets dry fastest now, with windows open and warm air moving, so anything that involves wetting a floor is easier in these two months than in any other.

This is also peak moving season, and moving is where cleaning goes wrong most often, because order matters more than effort. Book four weeks out, do the exterior jobs while there is still time, and clean the property you are moving into before the van arrives rather than after, which is the spine of the moving timeline. One local thing to plan around: the city’s household recycling centres run on a booking system, bulky waste collection is chargeable and garden waste is a paid annual subscription, so disposal is not a job for the morning of the move.

What does not belong in August is gutter clearing. The leaves have not fallen yet.

September and October: the last reliable exterior window

September is the last month before the wet run, since October, November and December are the three wettest on the Winterbourne figures. Anything outdoors that has been put off goes now: windows, render, conservatory roofs, drives, fascias and soffits. It is also the last month with enough daylight to see what you are doing on a three-storey elevation.

September is not the month for gutters, and that is the mistake repeated every year. A gutter cleared in early September on a road full of sycamore is full again by mid November, and you have paid for it twice. October is transitional: fine as a first pass under heavy canopy, no substitute for the real one.

November and December: the fixed point of the year

Gutters, once the leaves are genuinely down and before sustained winter rain. This is the one date in the year that is not negotiable, and the reason is the building fabric rather than the gutter. Historic England’s guidance on damp in older buildings gives the mechanism: a solid wall has no cavity and no drainage plane, brick and lime mortar are porous, and damp shows on the inside face when the wetting rate exceeds the drying rate. A blocked gutter keeping one stretch of wall saturated for weeks is exactly that, which is why the stain turns up in an upstairs corner and gets misdiagnosed as rising damp.

December is the wettest month at Winterbourne, so a run left full in November gets the worst four weeks of the year to work with. The comparison is not close: one clear-out against repointing, blown render, rotten fascia or internal replastering, which is set out in what a blocked gutter actually costs. Under mature canopy, which takes in most of Moseley, Hall Green, Harborne and Sutton Coldfield, twice a year beats once.

With around 42 frost days a year, the other winter rule is not to leave a washed path or step wet going into a freeze. Algae already makes hard surfaces slippery. Adding a film of ice is how somebody ends up on their back by the bins.

What is genuinely annual, and what do people over-schedule?

Four jobs earn a fixed place in the year. Everything else is a response to something rather than a date in a diary.

• Gutter clearing once a year in late autumn, twice under mature trees, with the downpipes flushed to prove the run flows
• The conservatory roof and its own small gutter once a year, in spring
• One deep clean a year to reset the kitchen and the bathrooms, held by regular visits afterwards
• Drives, patios and paths once a year, timed to a dry spell rather than to a month

The over-scheduled list is longer. Sealing a patio is optional and advice on it varies; what is not optional is replacing the jointing material after a wash. Annual carpet cleaning in a low-traffic house with no pets is usually a year early. Repeated cleaning of failed silicone is a subscription to a repair. And descaling products are close to redundant in the city, because Birmingham is normally supplied with soft water from the Elan Valley, at roughly 29 to 51 mg/l on Severn Trent’s published figures. Cross into Sutton Coldfield, Walsall or Sandwell and you are on South Staffs Water, where Sutton Coldfield runs at 188.9 mg/l. You can check your own postcode in a few seconds. If you moved a few miles and the kettle started furring up, that is why.

The year on one page

• January and February: interiors, ventilation, bathroom sealant, carpets by a low-moisture method, pre-viewing cleans
• March and April: spring clean in sequence, conservatory roof, first window cycle, patio work in the driest month
• May and June: drives and paths, re-sanding, student changeover, exterior everything
• July and August: carpets while they dry fast, moving and handover cleans, holiday lets, empty property work
• September: the last dependable exterior month, windows, render, roofs, fascias
• October: transitional, a first gutter pass under heavy canopy, nothing needing a dry surface
• November and December: gutters once the leaves are down, downpipes flushed, no wet paths going into a frost

What has no season at all?

Anything driven by an event rather than by weather. End of tenancy cleans happen when the tenancy ends. After-builders cleaning happens when the last trade leaves, not while they are still cutting. Changeovers, insurance work and a house going on the market arrive when they arrive. A regular fortnightly visit is not seasonal either, and its whole value is that it does not vary. Shopfront and office glass runs to footfall and traffic rather than to the calendar, which is why Erdington High Street shopfronts want a far shorter interval than the houses two streets behind it.

The useful version of a calendar is short. Clear gutters in late November. Do the outside work in March and September. Leave the inside for January. Everything else can move. Tell us which jobs you are trying to fit into which month, and we will give you a price and an estimated time before we start rather than after, and say plainly where a job is better left until the following season.

Domestic Cleaning in Birmingham: what we actually see

The same month does different work in different parts of the city. In Moseley the tree cover is the calendar: gutters fill through October and November, north-facing paths and steps green over, and conservatory roofs collect sap and leaf stain on top of the algae already there. In Northfield the stock is interwar and post-war, so the seasonal jobs are drives, side paths, pebbledash and weathered uPVC, and what those want is a dry spell rather than a date in the diary.

Erdington stretches the year out further, because a single street there can hold a Victorian villa near the station, a semi with a conservatory, a communal stairwell in a block of flats, and High Street shopfronts that need attention far more often than any house does. A calendar is a starting point rather than a schedule. What it is genuinely useful for is stopping people booking exterior work in the wettest fortnight of the year, and clearing gutters before the leaves have finished falling.

We do this work across Birmingham and the West Midlands. If you want the detail on how we do it and what it costs, see our domestic cleaning service, or read about the areas we cover it in most: Moseley, Northfield and Erdington.