How Do You Clean a Flat That’s Stood Empty for Six Months Before New Tenants Move In?

How Do You Clean a Flat That’s Stood Empty for Six Months Before New Tenants Move In?

Run every tap and flush every loo before you do anything else, then open all the windows and go and have a coffee for twenty minutes. The smell in a long void isn’t dirt. It’s drain gas coming up through traps that have evaporated dry, and if you start cleaning without dealing with that you’ll spend the whole day chasing a smell you can’t find and blaming the carpet.

Voids are the strangest cleaning job there is. Nothing has happened in the flat and yet it’s in worse condition than a place four people have lived in.

Dust behaves differently, mould appears where nobody made steam, and the flat has developed a smell of its own that new tenants will notice in the first four seconds and never quite forget.

What actually goes wrong in a flat where nobody’s been?

Four things, and none of them are dirt in the ordinary sense.

Traps dry out. Every waste has a U-bend holding a plug of water that stops sewer gas coming back up, and in an unheated empty flat that water evaporates in eight to twelve weeks. Kitchen sink, basin, bath, shower, washing machine standpipe, and the one everyone forgets – the floor gully outside if there is one, and the overflow on a rarely used cloakroom basin.

Damp appears without anybody generating it. There’s no heating, no air movement, and whatever moisture is in the fabric of the building goes to the coldest surface available. In a north-facing bedroom of a solid-walled conversion that means a bloom of black spotting in the top corner and along the outside wall behind where the wardrobe stood. Nobody breathed it out. It came from the building.

Dust settles into a film rather than a layer. Six months of undisturbed settlement produces something fine and even and slightly greasy, and it doesn’t lift with a dry cloth the way a fortnight of dust does – it smears.

And insects. Dead flies on every south-facing windowsill, spider webs in ceiling corners, and in a ground-floor flat, silverfish in the bathroom.

The smell, specifically

Stale air in a sealed flat gets into soft surfaces. Carpet, underlay, curtains, any remaining upholstery, and the pile of the doormat.

It reads as musty rather than dirty and it’s the single thing most likely to lose you a viewing. Air alone doesn’t shift it once it’s in textile – you need airflow for days plus a proper hot water extraction on the carpets, and you need to do the extraction early enough that the flat dries fully before anyone moves in.

Booking the carpets for the morning before check-in is the classic void mistake. A damp carpet in an unheated flat in November is still damp four days later and now smells worse than it did.

What order should the work run in?

Ventilate and plumb first, dry second, clean third, and everything I said about high-to-low and floors-last applies once you get to the third stage.

Day one is not a cleaning day. Open everything, fill every trap, turn the heating on and leave it on at eighteen degrees, run the shower hot for five minutes, flush both loos twice. If the water’s been off at the stopcock, open it slowly and check under sinks afterwards – seals shrink in a dry system and I’ve come back to a puddle in a kitchen in Leyton because a compression joint under a basin had let go an hour after I turned the water on.

Then leave the flat with heating on and trickle vents open for two or three days if the schedule allows. That single measure does more than any product. Heat plus air movement drives the residual moisture out of plaster and soft furnishings, and it’s what makes the difference between a flat that smells fresh and one that smells cleaned.

Only then the actual clean, and it’s essentially a deep clean with a mould treatment and a heavier emphasis on soft furnishings than usual.

The heating question landlords argue about

Turning the heating on in an empty flat for a week costs perhaps twenty pounds and prevents most of what I’ve just described.

Voids get left cold because nobody wants to heat an empty property, and then eight hundred quid of mould remediation and carpet replacement happens in a flat that could have been kept at fifteen degrees on a timer for the price of a takeaway. The insurance angle matters too – unoccupied property endorsements frequently require a minimum temperature over winter, and if a pipe goes in a flat that was left cold in breach of that condition, the claim gets interesting.

Set a frost stat or a timer. Two hours morning and evening is enough.

How do you handle the mould, and is it your problem or the building’s?

Treat it and then work out where the moisture came from, in that order, because a tenant is moving in.

The treatment on surface mould on painted plaster is straightforward and specific. Don’t dry brush it – that aerosolises spores through the flat. Damp-wipe first with a fungicidal wash, leave the dwell time on the label rather than the one you’ve decided is enough, then wipe off, dry the surface, and if it’s marked the plaster underneath needs a stain block before repainting or it ghosts through emulsion within a fortnight.

Bleach on porous plaster is a half-measure. It kills what’s on the surface and takes the colour out of what’s underneath, which is why mould treated with bleach looks gone and comes back in the same shape in six weeks.

Where it came from is nearly always ventilation and cold surfaces rather than a leak, in a void. No leak produces a neat bloom in a top corner. But check anyway – look at the ceiling directly beneath any bathroom above, look under the bath, look at the wall by the soil stack, and photograph anything ambiguous before you touch it, because if it turns out to be a defect you’ve just cleaned off the evidence.

The bit that’s the landlord’s problem, not the cleaner’s

If the flat has no working extractor in the bathroom, or the kitchen extractor recirculates through a filter nobody’s changed, the mould will be back inside one winter and it will be the new tenants’ fault by then.

I say this on quotes now and it doesn’t always go down well. A void clean that removes visible mould without anybody fixing the airflow is a cosmetic job that hands a known problem to somebody who’ll be blamed for it, and I’ve watched the same corner of the same bedroom in a flat in Thornton Heath get treated three times across two tenancies.

Fifteen minutes with an extractor fan is cheaper than three treatments. It’s also the difference between a tenancy that renews and one that ends in a dispute.

What needs replacing rather than cleaning?

Filters, sealant, and sometimes the carpet, and being honest about the third one saves everybody a wasted day.

Any extractor filter, cooker hood filter or MVHR panel that’s sat for six months goes in the bin rather than through a sink. Silicone in a bathroom that’s been unused and cold often has mould growing inside the bead rather than on it, and no amount of scrubbing reaches that – it comes out with a blade, the surface gets cleaned and dried properly, and new sanitary-grade sealant goes in. That’s an hour and it transforms how a bathroom reads.

Carpet is the judgement call. If it’s ten years old, greyed, and smells after extraction and drying, extraction is money spent to postpone a decision. Tell the landlord straight, with a photograph of the pile parted, and let them decide. Underlay is usually the thing holding the smell, and there’s no cleaning underlay.

The kitchen appliances after a long void

Fridge and freezer doors should have been propped open when the flat was emptied and about half the time they weren’t. A sealed fridge left off for six months grows something specific and the seal absorbs it.

Bicarb, hot water, seal channel done with a soft brush, and then left open with a bowl of bicarb in it for a couple of days. If it still smells, it’s not going to stop, and a new tenant will open it once and mention it in their first email.

Washing machine gets a hot maintenance cycle empty, plus the drawer and the door seal, which will have mould in the fold at the bottom. Dishwasher the same. Both take an hour of elapsed time and no attention, so start them when you arrive.

What should be done in the last day before check-in?

Nothing wet. That’s the rule and I hold it firmly.

Carpets extracted at least three days out, in a heated flat, with air moving. Sealant done four days out so it’s fully cured and doesn’t photograph dark or feel tacky. Floors mopped the day before rather than the morning of. Anything that puts moisture into a flat which has spent six months learning to hold moisture wants time to leave again.

The day itself is the light pass and the checks. Fill every trap again, because if the flat’s been standing since the deep clean the traps in the rarely used wastes may already be low. Test every light. Run the extractor. Check the boiler pressure and that the hot water actually comes through. Open the windows for an hour and shut them before you go, and leave the heating on a low constant rather than off.

Then the check-in inventory, which in a void flat is worth doing with more photographs than usual – a flat that’s been empty has small defects nobody has been present to notice, and the tenant will find them in week one and be accused of causing them. Photograph the mould corner even after treatment. Photograph the carpet. Photograph the marks on the wall where the wardrobe stood.

Leave a window on the vent latch in every room and tell the incoming tenant why. They’ll close them all on day one anyway, but at least somebody said it.

Should a Probate Flat Be Cleaned Before or After the House Clearance?

After. Always after, and if somebody has told you otherwise they’ve either not done one or they’re selling you two visits.

I say that knowing the instinct runs the other way. People ring me first because cleaning feels like the manageable part – a defined job with an end, performed by somebody else, in a flat they’re finding difficult to be in. Clearance is the bit that requires decisions.

But cleaning a full flat is cleaning around forty years of possessions, and every surface you reach is one you’ll have to reach again once the wardrobe’s gone.

Why does the order matter more here than on an ordinary job?

Because probate clearances are slower and messier than any other kind, and the mess arrives in stages nobody schedules.

A house clearance firm empties a flat in a day. A family clearing a parent’s flat takes six weekends, and that’s normal and fine. Boxes come out in batches, somebody’s brother comes down from Leeds one Saturday, the sofa goes on a Tuesday when the man with the van has a slot. Furniture drags across carpet and lifts a strip of grit that’s been under it since 1998. Wardrobes come apart and shed forty years of dust from the top. A mattress goes down the stairs and takes the paint off a corner.

Clean into that and you’re paying twice. I’ve done it – a first-floor flat in Catford where I cleaned throughout on the Thursday and came back four weeks later to find the hall carpet worse than when I’d started, because everything in the flat had been dragged along it.

The second reason is that dirt in a probate flat is under things rather than on them. The kitchen floor behind a fridge that hasn’t moved since the appliance was delivered. The wall behind a wardrobe. That’s where the actual work is and none of it is reachable while the furniture is there.

The exception, and it’s a real one

If the flat smells, or there’s a hygiene issue, or anything organic is involved, something happens immediately and it isn’t a normal clean.

Fridge and freezer contents out on day one, bins out, anything perishable gone, and if there’s been a period of illness or the flat was unattended for a while, that’s a specialist visit before anybody spends a Saturday sorting photographs in there. Nobody should be going through their mother’s paperwork in a flat that smells.

That’s a hygiene intervention, not a clean, and it’s a couple of hours. The proper clean still waits for the clearance.

Who is meant to be doing this, and are they allowed to?

The executor, or the administrator if there’s no will, and the answer to “allowed” is more nuanced than families expect.

Until probate is granted the executor’s authority to deal with the estate is limited, and while it’s normal and sensible to secure a property, clear perishables and make it safe, disposing of contents of any value before the grant is the thing that causes trouble later. Anything that might be worth something – jewellery, a watch, furniture that isn’t flat-pack, pictures, coins, tools, anything anybody in the family has ever mentioned – stays until there’s agreement in writing about what’s happening to it.

The trouble is almost never with strangers. It’s with a sibling who finds out in November that the dining table went to a charity shop in September.

So the sequence that avoids most of it: secure and photograph the flat, deal with hygiene, get a written inventory of anything of possible value, agree in the family who gets what, then clear, then clean, then market.

What insurers want to know about an empty flat

Tell the buildings insurer the property is unoccupied, in writing, on the first week.

Most household policies restrict or void cover once a property has been empty for thirty to sixty days, and probate flats routinely sit for six months. There’s usually an unoccupied-property endorsement available, sometimes at extra premium, sometimes with conditions – heating maintained at a minimum temperature over winter, water drained down, letterbox cleared, visits logged.

Nobody thinks about this and then a pipe goes in January. I’ve been into a flat in Beckenham where the ceiling had come down over a bed nobody had slept in for eight months, and the family were dealing with a leak, a claim and a probate valuation simultaneously.

What does a clean actually add to a probate sale?

Less than the agent will tell you and more than nothing, and where it lands depends entirely on who’s buying.

If the flat is going to market as a doer-upper – “in need of modernisation,” original kitchen, 1970s bathroom, and every viewer is a builder or a developer – cleaning buys you almost nothing. Those buyers price the kitchen at zero and the bathroom at less. What matters to them is access, floor plan, condition of the roof and the lease. A spotless dated kitchen is still a dated kitchen and they’ve already deducted it.

If the flat is presentable and going to an owner-occupier, a clean matters, but the specific version that matters is a light one aimed at the photographs and the viewings rather than a full deep clean of every cupboard.

The thing that genuinely moves a probate flat is emptiness and light. An empty, aired, well-lit flat with the curtains taken down and the bulbs all working reads as a project with potential. The same flat half-cleared, with three boxes in the hall and a stripped bed, reads as sad, and viewers hurry.

What I’d spend the money on instead

Skip and a man with a van, then a window cleaner, then me for half a day.

Windows in particular – probate flats often have nets up and glass nobody’s done in years, and taking the nets down and cleaning both sides changes the light in every room more than anything I do with a mop. Then take the curtains down too if they’re old, because they’ll be heavy, dated and smell of the flat.

Bulbs next. Same colour temperature throughout, every fitting working, including the one in the hall that’s been dead since before.

Then floors and bathroom and kitchen properly and leave the rest. Nobody is opening the airing cupboard at a viewing on a flat like this.

When does the flat need more than a clean?

Three situations, and they’re worth naming plainly because families are usually told about them by somebody standing in the doorway quoting a number.

Smoking, first. Decades of it goes into ceiling and wall paint, and it’s a sugar soap wash followed by a stain-blocking primer and a repaint. No clean fixes it. If the flat smells of smoke from the communal landing, budget for decorating and don’t waste money on the intermediate step.

Second, hoarding or heavy clutter. That’s specialist clearance work with its own risk assessment, and the cleaning happens at the end of a process rather than as part of it. Ordinary house clearance firms will sometimes take it on and then re-quote on the day, which is a horrible conversation to have on a Saturday morning.

Third, any death that wasn’t discovered quickly. Specialist trauma cleaning, immediately, and the family should not be in the flat while it happens or ideally before. Check whether the buildings policy covers it, because some do.

The jobs I turn down

I don’t sort. I don’t value, I don’t decide what’s rubbish, and I won’t be the person who bins something.

That’s a line I drew after a garden flat in Nunhead where I put a chipped mug in a black bag and it turned out to be the only thing in the kitchen anyone in the family actually wanted. Now the rule is that the flat is cleared before I arrive, and anything left in it is either staying or has been marked.

If a family wants somebody to work through the contents with them, that’s a clearance service or a probate specialist, not a cleaner, and the two shouldn’t be sold as one thing.

What order should the whole process actually run in?

Secure, hygiene, valuation, clear, repair, clean, photograph.

Secure means locks checked, keys accounted for, post redirected, insurer told, utilities read and the heating left on a frost setting through winter. Hygiene is the perishables and anything organic, week one. Valuation before clearance if there’s anything of possible worth, and probate valuations of contents are usually needed for the estate return anyway.

Clearance next, in whatever number of weekends it takes. Then any small repairs – the door that doesn’t shut, the missing kitchen handle, the socket faceplate – because those happen best in an empty flat and generate their own dust.

Then me, in an empty flat with the furniture gone and the walls bare, which is a day rather than two and does a better job than anything possible before that point. Then the photographer, the following morning, so the silicone has dried and doesn’t photograph dark.

One practical thing about that final visit. Somebody from the family should be there for the first ten minutes, walk me round, and point at anything ambiguous – the box in the hall, the jars on the windowsill, the pictures leaning against the bedroom wall. Not because I need instructions on cleaning. Because in a flat that’s supposed to be empty, anything left behind was left on purpose, and I’d rather ask.

Take the photographs off the walls yourself before the clearance. Everybody forgets, and then they come down in a box with everything else.

Who Pays for the Clean When a Guest Leaves a Property Beyond the Cleaning Fee?

Nobody, usually. You pay, then you spend three weeks trying to get it back, and whether you succeed comes down to what you photographed before you started cleaning.

The cleaning fee is not a damage deposit and never was. It buys a turnover at the standard scope – what a turnover clean covers – and anything beyond that scope is an extraordinary cost that has to be claimed for through a separate mechanism with its own rules and its own clock.

Most hosts find this out on the morning it happens, which is the worst possible moment to be reading a help page.

What counts as beyond the fee, and who decides?

Anything outside the agreed turnover scope, and the person who decides is an Airbnb case handler in a different country reading two sets of photographs.

That’s not cynicism, it’s the process. There’s no adjudicator walking your flat. There is a claim, a set of images, whatever the guest says in response, and a decision made on paper. So the practical definition of “beyond the fee” is whatever you can demonstrate was different from the property’s normal state, not whatever felt outrageous at eleven in the morning.

The things that genuinely cross the line: smoking in a non-smoking listing, which means curtains, soft furnishings and often a professional treatment. Pet urine or hair where no pet was declared. Vomit or bodily fluid on a mattress. A party – forty people in a two-bed leaves a flat that needs a full day, not three hours. Excessive rubbish, meaning bin bags stacked in a hallway rather than a full kitchen bin. Furniture moved and not returned. Sick on a carpet is the one I get called for most.

What doesn’t cross it, whatever your cleaner says on the phone: a messy kitchen, dishes in the sink, beds slept in properly, a bath that needs scrubbing, hair in a shower drain, crumbs. That’s the job. A guest is not obliged to clean, and hosts who dispute at that level get marked as difficult by the platform and lose the ones that matter.

The scope document that solves half the arguments

Write down what the turnover fee buys and give it to your cleaner in writing.

Three hours, two operatives, this list of tasks, this staging standard. Then anything past it is billable at an hourly rate with photographs attached, and your cleaner knows they can stay and do the work rather than ringing you from the doorway asking permission while a guest is arriving at two.

Without that document, every exceptional job becomes a negotiation on the day, and the negotiation happens under time pressure with somebody’s suitcase in the corridor. I’ve had that conversation in a stairwell in Camberwell with an owner in Singapore and a check-in in ninety minutes, and we both made a bad decision.

What has to happen before anybody touches anything?

Photograph. Then video. Then start.

Same discipline as an insurance loss, and for the same reason – the person deciding will only ever see what you recorded. A flat that has been cleaned is a flat with no evidence in it, and a cleaner’s word about how bad it was three hours ago carries almost nothing.

Walk in and film first. Sixty to ninety seconds, room by room, narrating what you’re seeing, phone clock in shot if you can manage it. Then stills: wide from each doorway, then close on every specific item – the stain with something beside it for scale, the burn on the sill, the bin bags in situ where they were left, the mattress with the protector pulled back, the carpet mark from directly above and again from a low angle so the texture reads.

Photograph the state of things you’ll be accused of exaggerating. Bottles on the worktop. The number of people’s worth of glasses. A pile of takeaway boxes.

Then the receipts, later – the specialist invoice, the replacement cost of the curtain, quotes if it’s a big number.

The window nobody watches

Get the claim in before the next guest checks in. That’s the practical deadline and it’s stricter than the written one.

Airbnb’s damage protection under AirCover requires a request within a set period after the guest departs and, critically, before the next reservation begins. Once somebody else has slept in the flat, causation is gone – you cannot show which guest produced the stain, and the case will close against you no matter how good the photographs are.

Which means a same-day turnover with an evening arrival gives you a few hours to make a decision that might be worth six hundred pounds. Decide fast, submit fast, tidy afterwards.

I’d block the night after any booking that felt off on the messages. Costs a hundred quid, buys you a whole day of evidentiary room.

How does the money actually flow?

Guest first, platform second, insurance third, and the order matters because skipping a step gets the claim rejected.

The sequence on Airbnb is that you raise a reimbursement request against the guest through the Resolution Centre with your evidence and your figure. They can pay it, in which case it’s done in a day and everyone’s fine. If they decline or ignore it, you escalate to Airbnb and AirCover considers it under the host damage protection, which is not an insurance policy in the conventional sense – it’s a platform guarantee with exclusions, limits and a documentation standard.

Direct bookings work differently and worse. There’s no platform, so you’re relying on whatever you took as a security deposit and whatever your terms say. Take a deposit or a card authorisation on every direct booking. Hosts who’ve moved off the platforms to save commission routinely forget they’ve also moved off the safety net.

Your own insurance is the third layer, and most standard landlord or holiday-let policies carry a malicious damage or accidental damage section with an excess that’s usually higher than the loss. Worth a claim on a party that’s wrecked a flat. Not worth it on a mattress.

The number that decides whether to claim at all

Work out the excess and the time cost before you start, because there’s a threshold below which claiming is worse than absorbing it.

A ruined mattress protector, two towels and an hour of extra cleaning is maybe ninety pounds. The claim will take you an hour to assemble, involve a guest who may retaliate in the review, and possibly land you a partial payout. I’d eat that and move on.

Four hundred pounds and up – smoking treatment, a curtain, a carpet, a full-day party clean – claim it, properly, with the evidence pack, and don’t be squeamish about it. Somewhere in between is judgement and I won’t pretend there’s a formula.

Should the cleaner be paid extra, and by whom?

The host, immediately, at an agreed hourly rate, regardless of whether the claim ever succeeds.

Here’s the part hosts don’t like. Your cleaner’s payment cannot be contingent on you recovering the money from the guest, and any arrangement where it is will destroy the relationship inside a year. They did the work on the day. The claim is your business risk.

I’ve been asked more than once to invoice “once it’s sorted with Airbnb,” and I now decline that in the first conversation rather than the third. One flat near London Fields, eleven hours across two visits after a party, and the owner wanted to see what the platform paid before settling with me. It paid something in the end and I was six weeks late being paid for a Saturday I’d already worked.

The workable arrangement is a standing rate for exceptional work, authorised by a message and a photograph, invoiced separately from the turnover fee so it’s clean for the claim. That separate invoice is also better evidence than a line on a regular bill.

The jobs your regular cleaner shouldn’t be taking on

Bodily fluid on a mattress, sewage backup, needles, and anything that needs biohazard handling. That’s not squeamishness, it’s a training and equipment question, and a domestic operator hasn’t got the PPE or the enzyme chemistry.

Same with smoke. Nicotine goes into wall paint and soft furnishings and it comes out with sugar soap, an ozone or hydroxyl treatment and sometimes a repaint. Wiping it makes the flat smell of wet cigarette.

Call a restoration firm, tell them what it’s for, and get an itemised invoice. The itemisation is what makes the claim work – “deep clean, £480” gets queried, while a line-by-line breakdown of treatment, materials and hours generally doesn’t.

What actually reduces how often this happens?

Screening and house rules, and neither is a cleaning question, which is why cleaners aren’t the ones who fix it.

Turn off instant book for one-nighters. One-night local bookings are the single strongest party signal there is and every host who’s had a flat wrecked will tell you the booking looked odd before it happened. Minimum two nights, and be suspicious of a same-city guest booking on a Friday.

Set the noise threshold with a decibel monitor rather than a camera, put the rules in the listing and in the check-in message rather than only in the fine print, and state the smoking position in a sentence that includes the cost. Guests respond to a number.

Then accept a certain failure rate and price it in. Over a year of steady letting, something will happen, and the hosts who handle it best treat it as a cost line rather than a betrayal. The ones who take it personally end up arguing over a towel in the Resolution Centre and getting a review that mentions it.

Keep the ruined bedding. Bagged, tied, in the bath, until the case closes.

What Does an Airbnb Turnover Clean Cover That a Domestic Clean Doesn’t?

Linen, consumables, damage reporting and a reset to a photograph. The cleaning is maybe half the job and it’s the half that goes wrong least often.

A domestic clean makes a home better than it was. A turnover makes a property identical to what it was on a specific date, when somebody photographed it, and then tells the owner what’s broken. Those are different disciplines and hiring for one when you need the other is why hosts churn through cleaners.

I do six of these a week across three properties. It took me about four months to stop cleaning them like flats.

What is a turnover cleaner actually being asked to produce?

The listing photographs, again, on a deadline.

That’s the whole brief and it’s worth stating baldly, because it reorganises every priority. A domestic client wants the kitchen degreased and doesn’t care whether the cushions are at forty-five degrees. A guest who booked a flat from fourteen images arrives expecting those fourteen images, and the gap between what they saw and what they walk into is the entire mechanism by which a review goes from five stars to three.

So staging isn’t decoration in this work. It’s the deliverable. Cushions squared, throw folded the way it’s folded in the photo, dining chairs pushed in, bedside lamps angled, remote controls parallel, the fruit bowl or whatever prop lives on the island back in position. Any good turnover operation runs from a photo pack – one image per room shot in the finished state, held on the cleaner’s phone, and checked against before leaving.

The cleaning underneath it is a good domestic standard, not a deep clean. Nobody is degreasing an extractor hood on a Saturday with a three-hour window.

The photo pack, and why it beats a checklist

Written checklists fail on this work because they describe actions and the guest experiences a state.

“Make bed” is a line on a checklist. It doesn’t say which way the duvet fold faces or that the third pillow is decorative. I’ve walked into a flat in Bethnal Green where three different cleaners over a month had made the same bed three different ways, and the host couldn’t work out why one guest mentioned it.

One photograph per room, updated whenever anything changes, and the instruction is match this. It also protects the cleaner – if the host complains, the photo is the standard both people agreed to.

What does a domestic clean simply never include?

Four things, and each of them carries its own failure mode.

Linen is the big one. Every bed stripped and remade with a fresh set, every towel out, bath mats, tea towels, oven gloves, and in a proper operation the mattress protector and pillow protectors checked underneath rather than assumed. That means a par level – three sets per bed minimum, so one’s on, one’s clean, one’s in the wash – and either an in-house laundry cycle or a hire contract. Hosts who run two sets discover the problem on the first same-day turnover with a delayed collection.

Consumables second. Loo roll, hand soap, washing-up liquid, dishwasher tabs, bin liners, kitchen roll, tea, coffee, sugar, salt, pepper, sponges, shower gel if the listing promises it. Somebody has to count these, carry stock, and replace them, and that person is the cleaner because nobody else is in the building.

Third: damage and inventory reporting, which I’ll come to.

Fourth, and least discussed – the cleaner is the property’s only regular inspection. Boiler pressure, a slow-draining shower, a smoke alarm chirping, a window handle that’s gone stiff, damp appearing behind a wardrobe. In a domestic clean none of that is your business. Here it’s the whole reason the owner sleeps.

The dishwasher and the cupboard audit

Guests put things away wrong, and a turnover has to correct it.

Pans in the wrong cupboard, a chef’s knife in the dishwasher going blunt, the good glasses on the bottom shelf, four mugs unaccounted for because they’re in the bedroom. Cutlery drawer counted, glassware counted, the crockery back at the number the inventory says. It takes ten minutes and it’s the difference between a kitchen that stays functional for two years and one that’s a jumble of survivors by August.

Check the dishwasher and the washing machine are empty. Someone has left a load in one of them, wet, and it will smell by Thursday.

How does the time pressure change what gets done?

Checkout at ten, check-in at three, and a good chunk of that gone to travel. On the day it’s frequently checkout at eleven and check-in at two, which is three hours for a two-bed including laundry handling.

You don’t deep clean in that window and pretending otherwise produces a flat that’s superficially staged and structurally filthy. What actually works is a two-tier system: the turnover covers a fixed scope every single time, and a scheduled deep clean covers the rest on a cycle – monthly or every six to eight turnovers, whichever comes first, booked into a deliberate blank day between bookings.

The deep list: oven, hood filters, fridge shelves out, descale kettle and shower head, grout, behind the appliances, mattress protectors laundered, windows, skirtings, wardrobe interiors, under the beds.

Hosts resist the blank day because it’s revenue foregone. They lose more to a review mentioning a dirty oven, and they lose it for months, because that review sits there while the price you can charge quietly drops.

Two people, not one

For anything above a studio, send two cleaners. It halves the elapsed time rather than the work, which is the only variable that matters when there’s a guest arriving at two.

One does beds and bathrooms, one does kitchen and living space, then both do floors and the staging pass together. In a one-bed in Shoreditch that’s ninety minutes with two and two and a half hours with one, and the second scenario is the one where the arriving guest is standing in the corridor with a suitcase.

Who reports damage, and what happens if nobody does?

The cleaner reports it, within twenty-four hours of the guest leaving, with photographs. If that doesn’t happen, the loss belongs to the owner permanently.

This is the part hosts underinvest in and it’s worth more than the cleaning. Airbnb’s damage protection under AirCover requires a claim raised within a defined window and before the next guest checks in – once somebody else has slept in the flat, you cannot attribute a stain to the previous party and the claim dies. Same logic as any insurance loss. The evidence has a shelf life measured in hours.

So the turnover protocol is: photograph before touching anything. Walk the flat, video if it’s bad, wide shot per room, close-ups of anything damaged or stained, then start work. Report through whatever channel the host uses – a WhatsApp thread is fine, an app is better – and note the small things too, because a chipped worktop that appeared in June and gets recorded in June is a different conversation from one discovered in November.

I photograph the bin contents in a shot when a party looks likely. Twice that’s mattered.

What I refuse to do without being asked twice

I won’t wash a stain out of a mattress protector or a sofa cushion before it’s been reported. That’s the same instinct that destroys insurance claims – the urge to make the problem disappear because making problems disappear is what cleaners do.

Same with a broken glass or a burnt pan. Photograph, report, then clear. It costs four minutes.

The one that comes up most is smoking. A non-smoking listing where somebody has smoked out of the bedroom window leaves a smell in the curtain and a burn on the sill, and the flat needs a treatment rather than a wipe. Report it the same morning or the host is eating a curtain replacement.

Should you hire a domestic cleaner and train them, or a turnover company?

Whichever you choose, budget properly, and this is where I’ll be unpopular with the hosts reading.

Turnover work is harder than domestic cleaning and most listings price it as though it’s easier. It carries a hard deadline, an inspection duty, physical laundry logistics, stock management and reputational consequence, and the going rate in London is often set by what the host thinks a guest will tolerate as a cleaning fee rather than by what the work costs. Then the cleaner cuts corners, the host churns to a cheaper one, and the flat degrades a bit with each rotation.

Pay above domestic rate, not below. A cleaner who knows the property, has a key, knows where the spare linen is and notices the boiler pressure dropping is worth two of anyone you can book at short notice on a platform.

Independent cleaner suits a host with one or two properties in one area, and you’ll build the photo pack and the stock list yourself over a couple of months. A turnover company suits three-plus properties or anyone not in the city, and you pay a margin for cover when somebody’s ill – which is the actual product you’re buying, because the failure that ruins a month is the one nobody could attend.

The keys and the access thing

Whoever it is, they need independent access and a way to raise the alarm. Lockbox or smart lock, code changed periodically, and a backup contact who can get there in forty minutes.

I’ve stood outside a flat in Deptford at eleven-fifteen with a guest arriving at two and the host asleep in another time zone, because the previous guest took the key with them to Gatwick. Nothing in that scenario is a cleaning problem, and all of it lands on the cleaner.

Leave the heating on low in winter and the extractor running for twenty minutes after you’ve done the bathroom. Arriving to a cold flat that smells of bleach reads as a cheap flat.

Is the Developer’s Handover Clean on a New-Build Flat Enough to Move Into?

No, and the reason isn’t laziness on the developer’s part. It’s that a handover clean is a presentation clean, timed for a walk-through, and the flat carries on shedding construction dust for a month after somebody signs a sheet saying it doesn’t.

I get called to new-builds about six weeks after completion, usually by somebody who has spent that whole time convinced the block has a dust problem and is now fairly cross about it.

The block doesn’t have a dust problem. Their flat does, and so does every other one on the floor.

What does a handover clean actually cover?

Whatever is visible from standing height on the day of the demonstration, plus the sanitaryware.

It’s typically done by a subcontracted cleaning team working through a floor of identical units at speed – somewhere between ninety minutes and three hours per flat is normal on a volume scheme. Worktops, sanitaryware, glass on the inside, floors, and a wipe of anything the buyer’s hand is likely to land on. It’s competent work under an impossible clock, and the specification comes from the developer, whose interest is a flat that looks immaculate for forty minutes while somebody is shown where the stopcock is.

What’s outside that spec: the tops of internal doors, wardrobe and kitchen unit interiors above eye level, the MVHR filters, the appliance cavities, the window channels, the underside of the shower tray lip, the tops of the skirting behind where furniture will go, and the ceiling void, which nobody can clean and which will empty itself onto your worktops over the next few weeks.

Also outside the spec, half the time: the protective film. Some schemes leave it on deliberately so the flat is protected during the buyer’s own move-in, then it becomes your job and nobody tells you.

The grout haze test

Run a dry finger diagonally across a bathroom floor tile near the wall, then look at the finger under a phone torch.

If it comes up with a fine pale powder, that’s cement or grout haze that was polished flat rather than removed, and it’s on every tiled surface in the flat including the ones that look perfect. Water makes it visible – the first time you shower, a matt bloom appears across the tray surround and people assume they’ve marked it.

It comes off with an acidic haze remover and a white pad, done in sections, and it gets meaningfully harder after about a fortnight. Do it in month one.

Why does a brand new flat keep producing dust?

Because the building is still finishing itself, and because you’re now living in a sealed box that has no way of losing anything.

Construction dust is largely gypsum, silica and MDF fibre, ground very fine by cutting and sanding, and it doesn’t settle once and stay put. It sits in the floor void, the ceiling void, the riser cupboard, the service duct behind the bath panel and the loft space where there is one. Every time somebody walks across a floating floor, every time a lift shaft moves air through the corridor, every time the flat below has a delivery, some of it comes back out.

Then there’s the block itself. On a phased development you are living inside an active site – the next core is being fitted out, the landscaping isn’t done, and the communal corridor gets tracked through daily by trades. In a flat in Woolwich I look after, the resident on the fourth floor had a grey line across her hallway carpet for eight months that corresponded exactly to the door swing, because the corridor outside was raw concrete until the scheme’s phase two finished.

The airtightness makes it worse rather than better. A Victorian conversion loses its air four or five times an hour through gaps you can’t see, which takes dust with it. A new-build at 3 m³/h/m² at 50 Pa loses almost nothing except through the ventilation system you were given, which brings us to the thing I actually came here to shout about.

The MVHR filters nobody has touched

If the flat has mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, and most new London flats built in the last decade do, there’s a unit in a cupboard or above the utility area with two filter panels in it.

Those filters have been running through the fit-out period in a lot of schemes, or been sitting in a dusty flat unwrapped. Nobody changes them at handover. They are the single most consequential thing in the flat for how it will feel to live in, and I’d guess four out of five owners I meet don’t know the unit exists, let alone that it has serviceable parts.

Find it in week one. Photograph the model number. Change the filters, don’t wash them – the pleated media doesn’t survive water. Set a reminder for six months, and every six months after.

Should you clean before you move the furniture in, or after?

Before, and give yourself a week if the completion date allows it. Almost nobody gets that week, so take whatever you can.

An empty new-build cleans in half the time and to twice the standard, because the jobs that matter are all in places furniture blocks. The wall behind where the bed goes. The bottom of the wardrobe. The strip of engineered board along the skirting. Behind the fridge cavity, which on a fitted kitchen is a sealed slot full of packaging offcuts more often than you’d believe.

Then run the heating up hard for a day and back down before anything soft comes into the flat. That first proper heating cycle drives residual moisture out of plaster and screed and moves dust out of the fabric, and it’s better it lands on a bare floor than on a new sofa. Screed in particular carries a lot of water – a liquid screed poured in autumn is still drying in spring, and it wants ventilation more than it wants a rug over it.

Off-gassing is the other reason. Fresh paint, adhesives, MDF, sealants and new carpet all release solvents, and a sealed flat concentrates the lot. Windows open a few hours daily for the first fortnight, boost on the extract, and it clears.

The protective film problem

Take it off early. All of it, including the strips on the underside of unit doors and the bit wrapped round the shower valve.

South-facing glazing bakes film onto glass within a few months and the carrier separates from the adhesive, so you get plastic off in ribbons and glue stays behind in a pattern. I spent a morning in a flat in Barking Riverside with a citrus solvent and a plastic blade on six months of baked film across a full-height living room window, and the client had assumed it was some kind of coating that came with the flat.

Never use a metal blade on new glazing without checking whether it’s coated. Low-E and self-cleaning coatings scratch, the damage is permanent, and it’s not covered.

What changes about how you clean a flat like this?

Almost everything, and the habits people bring from a period conversion actively cause problems here.

Less water, for a start. Engineered wood and click-fit LVT over screed do not want a wet mop – water goes into the joints, the board edges swell, and on a floating floor there’s nowhere for it to escape. Damp microfibre, wrung out hard, and that’s it.

Composite and quartz worktops don’t want acid. No vinegar, no limescale remover, no cream cleaner with a bleach content on quartz – it dulls the resin and the damage doesn’t reverse. Matt black taps and matt cabinet fronts, which are everywhere on new schemes now, hate anything abrasive and show every fingerprint, which is a design decision somebody made without ever having cleaned one.

Condensation is the habit change that matters most. A sealed flat with two people breathing in it produces a lot of moisture, and if the ventilation is set to trickle and the filters are blocked, it lands on the coldest surface available – usually a window reveal or the corner of a north-facing bedroom. Mould in a two-year-old flat is nearly always a ventilation issue and nearly always gets treated as a cleaning issue. Wiping it is a fortnightly job forever. Fixing the airflow is a Saturday.

The snagging point most people miss

Cleaning your flat properly in the first fortnight is the best snagging inspection you will ever do, and it’s free.

You will find the chipped worktop edge, the scratched shower screen, the door that doesn’t close on its latch, the socket faceplate that’s proud of the wall, and the grout line that was never filled – because you’ll have your face six inches from all of it. Most developers run a defect period of two years for non-structural items under NHBC-style cover, and the first months are when reporting is easiest.

Photograph as you go. Send the list in one email rather than seven.

Is any of this the developer’s problem or yours?

Split, and the line is roughly between defects and dust.

Defects are theirs – chips, scratches, misaligned doors, unsealed joints, missing grout, damaged units, anything not built or finished to standard. Report them, in writing, in the defect period, and don’t let anybody tell you a chipped worktop is wear.

Dust is yours, in practice. There’s usually no contractual standard for cleanliness at handover beyond something vague, and arguing about grout haze six weeks after completion is a fight you’ll lose slowly. Pay somebody two hundred quid, get it done properly once, and put your energy into the snag list where there’s actual money at stake.

The exception is a flat handed over with visible construction debris or an obviously skipped clean. That’s worth an email on day one with photographs attached, and it does sometimes get a team sent back.

Where I end up on most of these jobs is one full clean at four to six weeks, after the block has settled and the worst of the shedding is done, rather than on completion day when everyone wants it. I’ve had that argument with buyers in Nine Elms and in Hackney Wick and I lose it about half the time.

Check the tops of the doors. Every trade in the building has leaned a piece of timber against one.

How Long After the Builders Leave Should the Sparkle Clean Happen – Before or After Snagging?

After. Snag first, then clean, and if your builder is pushing for the reverse it’s because a clean flat photographs as a finished flat and he wants sign-off.

That’s the short answer and it costs me work, because the builder-instructed clean is the one that arrives without an argument attached and the client-instructed one always comes with a conversation about who’s paying for the second visit.

There’s always a second visit. That’s the part nobody tells you at the start.

Why does the order matter so much on a refurbishment?

Because snagging generates mess and cleaning destroys evidence, and doing them the wrong way round means paying for both twice.

A snag list on a full flat refurb runs to somewhere between forty and a hundred and forty items in my experience, and the fixes are not cosmetic afterthoughts. Somebody comes back to ease a door, and there’s sawdust on the landing carpet. Somebody re-grouts a shower tray corner and there’s haze across four square metres of tile. Filler goes into a cracked mitre on the skirting, gets sanded, and a fine white dust settles over the entire ground floor including the tops of the doors you had wiped a fortnight earlier. Paint touch-ups drip.

I did a garden flat in Peckham where the sparkle clean happened on the Thursday, the snag return happened over the following Tuesday and Wednesday, and by Thursday week the place was measurably dirtier than before I’d started. The client had paid me four hundred and ten pounds to prepare a surface for a decorator’s sander.

The other half of it is that dirt hides defects. A hairline crack in a bath panel, a chip on a worktop edge, a scratch on new glazing – all of that is invisible under construction film, and if you clean it off, sign the snag list, and find the chip in week three, you’re arguing about who did it with nobody left on site.

Where the builders’ clean fits in all this

There are two cleans on a proper job and they get conflated constantly.

The builders’ clean is rough. Debris out, offcuts and packaging removed, floors swept and vacuumed with an M-class machine, dust knocked off surfaces, protective sheeting lifted, paint spots taken off glass and sanitaryware with a blade. It’s a working clean that makes the site safe and usable and it should be in the builder’s contract. Ask for it in writing before work starts – most standard JCT-style domestic contracts include a clause about leaving the works clean, and most small builders’ quotes don’t mention it at all.

The sparkle clean is a domestic-standard finish clean. Every surface, inside every cupboard, all glass, all fittings, the works.

If you let the builder do both, the sparkle isn’t a sparkle. It’s the same two lads with the same vacuum charging you a different rate.

When has the dust actually stopped falling?

Not on the day the van leaves. Three weeks is realistic for a full-flat refurb, and longer if there’s been any ceiling work.

Construction dust is mostly gypsum and silica and it’s very fine – a lot of it goes airborne during cutting and sanding and simply stays there for days. It settles onto every horizontal surface, then onto the tops of doors, picture rails, curtain poles, radiator fins, the inside of light fittings, the tops of kitchen wall units where you can’t see, and into the ceiling void and the floor void, from which it emerges gradually every time somebody walks across a suspended timber floor or opens a loft hatch.

I have been called back to properties in Herne Hill and in Stroud Green five and six weeks after final handover by clients convinced somebody had been in the flat, because a grey film had reappeared on the worktops overnight. Nobody had been in. The ceilings were still shedding.

So the sequence I’d actually run: builders’ clean on completion, snagging inspection within a few days while everything is still ugly and honest, snag fixes over one to three weeks, then the sparkle clean at the end, and then a light second visit before you move furniture in if the gap has been long.

The extractor and the filters

Two things get missed on nearly every post-refurb clean and both of them matter more than the worktops.

Any MVHR or extract system that was running during works has drawn construction dust through its filters and often into the ductwork. Filters need changing, not cleaning, and if it’s a new-build-standard MVHR unit that’s a specific part and a specific job. Running it dirty pushes plaster dust round the flat for months.

The other is the boiler cupboard and any airing cupboard with a slatted door. Dust goes in there, sits, and comes back out every time the fan cycles. I open those on arrival now, before I quote, because it’s a twenty-minute job on its own and I’ve stopped absorbing it.

What does a sparkle clean actually include after building work?

More than a deep clean, and the difference is chemical rather than a question of effort.

Plaster splash, cement film, adhesive residue, grout haze, silicone smears, paint spots and protective tape gum are not soil. They don’t respond to detergent because they’re not dirt sitting on a surface – they’re partly bonded to it. Cement film on porcelain tiles needs an acidic cement remover and a controlled dwell time. Grout haze comes off with a haze remover and a white pad, and if you leave it more than a fortnight it cures and gets substantially harder. Adhesive gum from protective film wants a citrus solvent and patience.

Then the physical work. Blade to glass and sanitaryware, at the right angle and only on genuine glass rather than coated panes. Every new window frame has a channel full of grit that a cloth pushes deeper in. New sockets and switch plates come with fingerprints and a static charge that holds dust. Radiators are done front and back with a fin brush before floors, never after.

The order is always high to low, dry to wet, and floors last. Wet-mopping construction dust turns it into a grey slurry that dries as a film, which is why so many post-builders floors look worse after the first mop than before it.

The bit that isn’t cleaning

Somebody has to remove the protective film from the windows, the kitchen units, the appliances, the shower tray and the worktop. It’s a real job, it takes hours, and it is not in most cleaning quotes.

Left on beyond a few months, particularly on south-facing glazing, that film bakes and the adhesive separates from the carrier, so you get the plastic off in strips and the glue stays. I spent most of a morning in a flat in Bow taking baked film off six units with a solvent and a plastic scraper, on units that were a week old and had had the film on since the factory.

Take it off yourself early if you want to save money. It’s tedious rather than skilled.

Who should be instructing and paying for the clean?

You, not the builder, and this is the practical heart of it.

If the builder subcontracts the sparkle clean, the cleaner’s client is the builder. Their job is to produce something that looks finished enough for you to sign off, on the tightest budget the builder can negotiate, on the day the builder needs it. Nobody in that chain is working for you.

Instruct it yourself, after the snag fixes, and the cleaner’s obligation runs to you. It also means you can walk them round and point at things, which is worth an hour of anybody’s time. And you can hold back a payment.

Retention is the mechanism people forget. Keep back a small percentage of the builder’s final invoice against snagging – five per cent is common on domestic work – and release it after the fixes are done. That single arrangement solves the sequencing problem entirely, because it removes the builder’s incentive to have the place looking clean before the list is agreed.

The disagreeable part

Builders who insist the flat must be cleaned before you inspect it are, in my experience, either disorganised or managing you. I’ve watched it enough times to have stopped giving the benefit of the doubt, and I’ll say it plainly even though half my referrals come from contractors.

A good builder wants the snag list early because it’s cheaper to fix while the trades are still local and the materials are still in the van. Somebody who wants the sparkle first, and wants it booked directly through them, and wants you to walk the property afterwards in nice light – that’s a sales sequence.

I turned down a job in Forest Gate on exactly that basis two winters ago, told the client why, and lost the contractor as a source of work for about eight months. He came back. The client didn’t sign off for another three weeks and found a cracked hearth.

What should you do the week before you move in?

Air it, run everything, and leave the furniture out for as long as your nerves allow.

New paint, adhesives, MDF, sealants and flooring all off-gas, and a flat that’s been sealed since the trades left will smell like it. Open everything for a few hours a day for a week if you can. Run the extractors. Run the heating up and back down once – that first heating cycle moves any remaining dust out of the fabric and it’s better it lands on bare floors than on your sofa.

Then the light second clean, the day before the van comes, and don’t book anything large for that day because you’ll want the flat empty while it happens.

Fill every trap. New waste pipes and unused traps in a freshly plumbed bathroom dry out fast and the smell that comes back up is drain gas, not dirt, and no amount of bleach fixes it. Run every tap and flush every loo for a minute.

Then check the tops of the internal doors with a finger. Everybody forgets doors.

Do I Need a Professional Clean Before the Check-Out Inventory, or Will My Own Do?

Read the check-in report before you book anything. The answer is in there, usually on page one or two, and about eighty per cent of the people who ring me asking this question have never opened the file the agent emailed them on the day they got the keys.

Most tenants who pay me for an end of tenancy clean are buying nothing. I’d rather say that in writing than keep taking the money quietly.

The other twenty per cent genuinely need it, and they’re almost never the ones who call.

What actually decides this – the standard of your clean, or the check-in report?

The report. Every time, and it isn’t close.

A deposit dispute is not an assessment of whether the flat is clean. It’s a comparison of two documents – the condition recorded at the start against the condition recorded at the end, with fair wear and tear taken off. If your check-in inventory has a photograph of an oven with baked-on residue on the door glass, and your check-out photograph shows the same oven in the same state, there is no deduction to make. You have returned the property as you found it. That’s the whole test.

Which means a tenant who moved into a mediocre flat and kept it at exactly mediocre has nothing to fear, and a tenant who moved into a genuinely spotless flat and hands back something merely tidy is exposed no matter how many hours they put in on the Saturday.

I cleaned a two-bed in Walthamstow last spring where the outgoing tenant had spent nearly four hundred pounds with me and would have won her deposit back with a hoover and a cloth, because the check-in report described the property as “clean to a domestic standard, some marking to kitchen units noted” and had eleven photographs to prove it. She’d never read it. She read it in front of me, in the hallway, while I was packing the machine away.

The line to look for on page one

Somewhere near the top of a decent inventory there’s a general condition statement about cleanliness. It’ll say something like “property professionally cleaned throughout prior to occupation” or “clean and tidy throughout” or, in the honest ones, “generally clean, see individual room notes.”

If it says professionally cleaned, your bar is high and you should think seriously about paying somebody. If it says clean to a domestic standard, your bar is a good domestic clean and you can meet it yourself with a weekend and a scraper. If there’s no statement at all and no photographs – which happens more than agents like to admit, particularly on smaller landlords’ own inventories – then the landlord has almost nothing to argue with and the burden of proving a deduction sits with them.

Check the individual room notes too. “Oven clean” is a sentence that will cost you two hundred pounds if you ignore it.

Can a landlord require you to pay for a professional clean?

In England, no, and this is the bit that still gets misrepresented on the doorstep.

The Tenant Fees Act 2019 bans landlords and letting agents from requiring a tenant to make a payment to a third party as a condition of the tenancy. A clause obliging you to hire a professional cleaning company, or to produce a receipt proving you did, falls inside that ban. It applied to new tenancies in England from 1 June 2019 and to all existing tenancies from 1 June 2020. Any such clause in your agreement is unenforceable and always has been for anyone signing since then.

What survives is the underlying obligation – return the property in the condition it was let in, allowing for fair wear and tear. A landlord can absolutely claim against your deposit for cleaning if the flat comes back dirtier than it went out. They can’t dictate who does the work or demand paperwork.

Agents in London still say it. I’ve heard it repeated on a landing in Bethnal Green by a lettings negotiator who genuinely believed it, not one who was chancing it, which is somehow worse.

What the invoice is actually worth in an adjudication

Very little on its own, and this surprises people who’ve paid for it specifically as insurance.

Deposit scheme adjudicators decide on evidence of condition. An invoice proves you spent money. It doesn’t prove the extractor hood filters were degreased or that anybody went behind the fridge. If the check-out photographs show grease on the hood and the adjudicator has a check-in photograph showing it clean, your receipt loses.

The photographs win. Yours, dated, taken on the day you hand the keys over, room by room from the doorway plus close-ups of every surface the inventory singled out. That’s the evidence that decides it, and it costs nothing.

There’s one narrow exception where the invoice does work, and it’s a guarantee rather than a receipt – some firms will return free of charge if the agent raises a cleaning point within a set window. That’s worth something real. Ask whether it exists before you book, because plenty of companies advertising an end-of-tenancy service don’t offer it.

Which jobs do adjudicators actually deduct for?

The same short list, over and over, and it barely varies across London.

Oven, hob and extractor. Fridge and freezer, including the seals and the drip channel at the back. Limescale on taps, shower heads and screens. Grout and silicone in the bathroom. Internal window glass and the sills. Behind and underneath anything that moves – cooker, fridge, washing machine, sofa. Wardrobe and cupboard interiors. Skirtings and radiator backs. The bins. The garden, if you’ve got one and it’s now a jungle.

What doesn’t get deducted: carpet that’s evenly worn and greyed after three years, scuffs on paint at picture height, a bit of tired-looking sealant, general dulling of anything. Fair wear and tear covers all of that and adjudicators apply it fairly generously. Betterment is a real principle – a landlord can’t use your deposit to get a property back in better condition than they let it, and they can’t charge you the full price of a new carpet for a four-year-old one.

The oven, and why it’s always the oven

More deposit deductions in this city come from ovens than from every other item combined, and the reason is that it’s the one job that can’t be faked in a morning.

A properly done oven means the shelves and runners out and soaking, the door split and both faces of the inner glass cleaned, the fan cover unscrewed where it comes off, and caustic paste left to work rather than wiped round hopefully. Three hours if you’ve never done it, and you’ll get maybe seventy per cent of the way there.

That single item is the argument for paying somebody, and it’s a decent argument. A specialist oven clean on its own runs sixty to ninety pounds in most of London and does more for your deposit than a whole-flat clean that skirts round it.

When is your own clean genuinely not enough?

Four situations, and outside them I’d tell you to save the money.

Pets, first – cat protein and dog odour go into carpet underlay and soft furnishings and they don’t come out with a domestic vacuum. If your agreement had a pet clause requiring professional treatment on exit, that clause is likely still enforceable in a way the general cleaning clause isn’t, because it’s tied to specific damage rather than a blanket condition.

Smoking or heavy vaping. Nicotine sits in wall paint and it’s a sugar soap job, not a cloth job.

Third: a check-in report that says professionally cleaned and has the photographs to back it. You’re being measured against a standard you can’t reach on your own knees, and a hundred and eighty quid protects a deposit that might be two grand.

Fourth: any tenancy where you’ve been there four years or more and the place has drifted without you noticing. Long tenancies are the ones where people are most confident and most wrong. A flat in Catford, seven years, lovely tenants, and the kitchen ceiling above the hob was tacky to the touch and neither of them could see it because it had happened at the speed of a fingernail growing.

The one nobody predicts – the second bathroom

Houseshares and two-bathroom flats. The en-suite that one person used and nobody else ever entered is reliably the worst room in the property at check-out, because responsibility for it was never collective and the person who used it left in March. Sydenham, a four-bed, exactly that – three immaculate rooms and a shower cubicle with a grout line I’d describe as geological.

Budget for it separately or do it first, while you still have energy.

What order should the last week run in?

Move out completely, then clean, then photograph, then hand the keys over. Cleaning around your own furniture is the most common wasted effort in the whole exercise and I watch people do it every summer.

Empty rooms clean in a third of the time. The strip of laminate along the skirting that the vacuum never reached, the wall behind the headboard, the wardrobe base where the shoes lived – none of that is reachable until the van has gone.

Then the photographs, the same day, before anyone else has been in the property. Wide shot of every room from the doorway. Close-ups of the oven interior with the door open, the hood filters, the fridge with the door open and the shelves in, the shower screen, every windowsill. Date visible if your phone will do it.

Send them to the agent by email on the day you return the keys, attached, with a line saying the property is left in the condition recorded at check-in. That email timestamps everything and it changes the tone of the conversation three weeks later when somebody proposes a deduction.

Keep the check-in report. People delete it the week they move in and then spend a fortnight in October trying to get a copy out of an agent who’s changed branch, changed staff, or gone under – I had a tenant in Finsbury Park who never did get hers, and she settled for less than she should have.

Put the bin out on the way to the car. There’s always more than you think.

Should I Clean Up After a Leak From the Flat Upstairs Before the Loss Adjuster Visits?

No.

That’s the short version, and I’d rather lose the booking than give you a longer one that sounds more balanced. People destroy more claims with a mop and a roll of kitchen towel than with any other object in the house. Water comes through a ceiling on a Sunday, the instinct is to make it go away, and by Tuesday the visible evidence of a two-thousand-pound loss is a slightly grey patch and a bucket in the hall.

There is a version of “doing something” that helps you. It looks quite different from cleaning.

Is there anything you should touch before the adjuster arrives?

Yes, and the line runs between mitigating the loss and tidying up after it.

Nearly every household and buildings policy carries a duty to take reasonable steps to prevent further damage. If water is still coming through, you are obliged to act – get upstairs and get their stop tap turned off, or get the block’s managing agent to do it, or in a real emergency get a plumber and keep the invoice. Move furniture out of the wet zone. Lift electronics off the floor. Put a bowl under the drip and empty it. If water has gone anywhere near a light fitting or a ceiling rose, kill that circuit at the consumer unit and call an electrician before anybody stands under it.

None of that is cleaning. All of it is documented as you go.

What you don’t do is scrub the tidemark off the wall, take the sodden rug to the tip, wipe down the inside of the ruined cupboard, or repaint anything. The adjuster only sees what’s left. A ceiling that has dried out and been wiped is, to a person whose job is to value a loss, a ceiling with a small stain on it.

The difference between mitigating and tidying, in practice

On the mitigation side: extracting standing water, lifting a saturated carpet off the floor so the underlay can be assessed, opening windows, running a dehumidifier, isolating power, moving your record collection.

On the tidying side: bin bags, bleach, cloths, a sponge on a ceiling, the skip. Anything that removes information.

The test I give people on the phone is simple. Would a photograph taken before you did it and one taken after look meaningfully different? If yes, don’t do it until somebody with a clipboard has been.

What should you be photographing, and when?

Before you move a single thing, and far more than feels reasonable.

Take video first – walk the room slowly, narrate what you’re seeing out loud, get the date on the phone’s clock into a shot if you can. Then stills. Wide shot of each affected room from the doorway. The ceiling from directly beneath. The tidemark on the wall with something for scale beside it, a phone or a ruler. The floor, including a shot of your hand pressing into the carpet so the water comes up around your fingers – that single image has done more work in disputes than any three others.

Then the contents. Every damaged item, individually, on a plain floor, with any label or serial number legible in a second shot. Receipts if you have them, and if you don’t, screenshots of the same item currently for sale online.

I dealt with a flat in Streatham where the ceiling came down over the bed at four in the morning. The tenant, half asleep and sensible, filmed ninety seconds of it before touching anything, then bagged the bedding and left it in the bath. The claim went through in six weeks with no argument. The identical thing happened two floors below in the same block eight months later, that tenant cleared up beautifully overnight, and the insurer paid for a stain block and nothing else.

The shots almost everybody forgets

Inside the airing cupboard and the built-in wardrobe on that wall – water tracks along joists and comes down inside cupboards where nobody looks for two weeks.

The skirting board joints, which swell before anything else does. The underside of a laminate plank at the edge of the room, lifted with a screwdriver. The electrical sockets on the affected wall. And a photograph of the source upstairs if your neighbour will let you in, because the cause of the leak determines which policy pays and that argument can run for months.

Which cleaning can you safely do while you wait?

Sewage, and standing water. Those are the two exceptions and both are about health rather than tidiness.

If the leak is from a soil stack or a toilet upstairs, that’s category three water and it’s a genuine hazard – do not live alongside it waiting for an appointment. Photograph it thoroughly, then get a specialist in, and tell your insurer you’re doing it and why. Same with any volume of standing water, which will find its way into the flat below yours and turn your one claim into two.

The adjuster only sees what’s left, and a bathroom that has been through a bottle of thick bleach looks like a bathroom with a minor plumbing niggle rather than one that had foul water across the floor.

The awkward middle is timing. Mould gets going on wet plaster and underlay within two to three days in a warm flat, and the honest tension in all of this is that an adjuster may not attend for a week or more. My position: chase the appointment hard, put the pressure on the insurer in writing, and while you wait, dry the air rather than the surfaces. Dehumidifier running, windows open when it’s dry outside, heating on low and constant. That reduces secondary damage without erasing anything, because a dried tidemark is still a tidemark.

On the neighbour upstairs

Be polite and claim anyway. The apology across the landing is worth nothing at all once a floor needs replacing, and I’ve watched too many people accept “I’ll sort you out, mate” and then discover in April that sorting out meant a tube of filler.

Their buildings policy, or the block’s, is there for exactly this. Using it is not an act of aggression, whatever the atmosphere in the bin store becomes. That’s the disagreeable bit and I’ll stand by it – in a converted house in Kentish Town I saw two leaseholders spend eighteen months not speaking to each other over four hundred quid that an insurer would have paid without a murmur.

Who is actually paying – upstairs, your insurer, or the block?

In a purpose-built block or a converted house with a share of freehold, the structure is nearly always covered by one buildings policy held by the freeholder or the management company. Ceilings, plaster, floorboards, fitted kitchens in many wordings. Your own contents policy covers your things – furniture, clothes, electronics, and often the flooring you laid yourself.

So a single leak usually generates two claims and two excesses. The buildings excess on an escape of water in a London block is frequently a thousand pounds or more, which is why managing agents will sometimes try to talk you out of claiming for smaller losses, and why leaseholders in the flat above are often quietly hoping you won’t.

The loss adjuster is not on your side. That’s not a slur, it’s a job description – they’re appointed and paid by the insurer to establish what happened and what it costs. Perfectly decent people, most of them. They are not your advocate, and if the loss is large or the wording is being read narrowly, that’s what a loss assessor is for, hired by you.

The excess conversation nobody has in advance

Ask the managing agent for the buildings policy schedule and the escape-of-water excess before you commit to anything. I’ve been in a flat in Poplar where the damage came to about eleven hundred pounds and the excess was a thousand, and the sensible outcome was a private arrangement with the neighbour and no claim at all. That’s a decision you can only make with the number in front of you.

When does a cleaner come into this, and who should be instructing them?

After the adjuster, and usually not you.

Most insurers appoint their own drying and restoration contractors, and if you’ve arranged your own before anyone has assessed the loss, there’s a decent chance the cost sits with you. Instructed after the visit, with the adjuster’s agreement, it goes on the claim. That sequence is the whole game.

There’s an exception worth knowing about. Some policies include emergency assistance cover with a helpline, and if you use that number the contractor who attends is the insurer’s contractor, which means their bill and their report both land on the right desk. Call the helpline before you call anybody local. It’s on the schedule, usually on page one, and about half the people I speak to have never opened the document.

Where a firm like mine fits is the end of it – the fine dust after a ceiling has been cut out and reinstated, the plaster residue on everything within four metres, the carpet in the room next door that nobody thought to protect. That work is real and it’s specific, and it usually happens six weeks after the leak rather than six hours.

The jobs I turn down at the door

Anyone who rings me on the day of a leak asking for an emergency clean before an insurance visit gets told what’s in this article and no invoice. I’ve done it in Crystal Palace, in Hither Green, and twice in the same building in one winter. It costs me a few hundred pounds a year in work I could have taken, and it saves those people considerably more than that.

The adjuster only sees what’s left. If you’ve already put it all in a skip, what’s left is your word.

Keep the wet bedding. Put it in a bin liner, tie it, and leave it in the bath.

Is It Worth Booking a Cleaner Before the Estate Agent’s Photographer Arrives?

Yes, but not the clean you’re thinking of, and not for the whole house.

A property photographer is in and out in about forty minutes and takes maybe fourteen images that will be viewed at postcard size on a phone. That’s the entire audience for the work. So the question isn’t whether the house is clean – it’s whether the fourteen frames are, and those two things overlap less than people assume.

I do a fair number of these. Agent rings on the Wednesday, shoot is Friday morning, vendor is halfway through packing. What follows is what I’ve learned about where that money goes furthest.

What does a wide-angle lens pick up that you’ve stopped noticing?

Reflection and texture. Those are the two things.

A 16mm lens shot from doorway height with the flash bounced off the ceiling turns every semi-gloss surface into a mirror. Splashes on a kitchen tile that are invisible when you walk past become a constellation of white dots on camera. Streaks on a shower screen, which the eye edits out because it knows what glass is meant to look like, photograph as grey smears across a quarter of the frame. The lens doesn’t care what you know about glass.

Texture is the other one. Limescale on chrome reads as pitting. Dust on a matt black lampshade or a radiator top reads as fur, because the flash rakes across it at an angle your eye never uses. Cobwebs in a ceiling corner, which nobody in the history of viewings has commented on in person, show up as grey rope in a corner-of-room shot because that corner is exactly where a wide-angle composition puts its weight.

Then there’s the stuff the camera generously ignores. Skirting-board dust. Under the sofa. The inside of any cupboard. Carpet that’s flat and greyed but even – the flash blows out subtle tonal difference, so a badly tired carpet often photographs acceptably while a clean carpet with one dark patch photographs as a stained carpet.

The three surfaces that decide a set of photos

Window glass, shower screen, hob. In that order.

Windows because half the frames in any daytime shoot are lit through them, and a dirty pane throws haze across the whole image and kills contrast. Interior side is the minimum, both sides if it’s a ground-floor flat and reachable. Shower screen because a bathroom shot is nearly always taken with the screen in frame and it’s the largest reflective object in a small room. Hob because kitchen photos are shot from the doorway with the hob at mid-frame, and burnt-on rings and a greasy splashback are the single most common thing I see in listings that have obviously been photographed after a “tidy up.”

Sort those three and the rest is optional. The lens doesn’t care about the airing cupboard. That’s not what a full deep clean quote will tell you.

Which rooms earn the money, and which can be skipped entirely?

Kitchen and main bathroom. Then the room with the best natural light, because that’s the one going on the portal thumbnail.

The kitchen takes the most hours and returns the most. Degrease the splashback and the hood, do the hob properly with a scraper rather than a cloth, clear the worktop down to two objects, wipe the front of the units including handles – handles are where the flash finds fingerprints – and clean the inside of the oven door glass if the oven is in shot, which it is in about every kitchen photo taken in a London flat.

Bathroom is quicker and higher risk. Limescale on the taps and the shower head, grout lines, the seal along the bath, the screen, the mirror, the loo including the hinges and the base. Take the bins out of the room altogether. Take the bath mat out too – photographers hate them and they read as a shapeless grey lump on a floor.

Bedrooms: a hoover, a made bed, clear surfaces, done. Twenty minutes each. Hallways barely matter because they’re rarely photographed and when they are it’s a narrow shot of a staircase.

The rooms I’d tell you to lock rather than clean

The box room full of packing boxes. The utility area. The garage. The under-stairs cupboard. Any room that’s currently a storage dump – shut the door, tell the photographer it’s not being shot, and put the money into the kitchen instead. A listing with nine good photos beats one with fourteen that includes a photo of your boxes.

Same goes for the garden in February. A photographer will take one shot from the back door regardless. Sweeping a patio in the rain is time nobody gets back.

When is a pre-photography clean not worth booking at all?

More often than you’d expect from someone whose living depends on the opposite.

Probate sales, first. If the flat is going to market as a doer-upper and every set of particulars will say “in need of modernisation,” a clean buys you nothing. Buyers looking at those are pricing the kitchen at zero. I’ve walked out of a first-floor flat in Forest Hill after twenty minutes with the executor, having told him to spend the three hundred quid on a skip and a man with a van instead, and the flat went to best-and-final at eleven grand over asking because five builders wanted it. The clean would have changed nothing.

Second: anywhere being sold to a developer or with planning already granted. Third: any property where the tenant is still in situ and hasn’t agreed to move their things. I’ve turned up to shoots where a tenant, understandably furious about being marketed around, has left the drying rack up in the living room. No amount of cleaning fixes a photograph of somebody’s washing. That’s a conversation for the agent, not a job for me.

And the honest general case – if your house is already reasonably kept and you have a free weekend, three hours of your own effort on those three surfaces will get you most of the way. The lens doesn’t care whether a professional did it.

The bit where I’d argue with your agent

Agents who tell a vendor the whole house needs a full professional deep clean before photos are usually either quoting a script or steering you toward a firm they have an arrangement with. I’ve read the emails. A four-bedroom house in Chiswick was quoted six hundred and eighty pounds for a “pre-marketing presentation clean” by a company the agent had recommended, and what that house needed was one cleaner for six hours and a window cleaner. It’s a soft upsell attached to a moment when vendors feel maximum anxiety and have the least room to push back, and it annoys me more than most things in this trade.

What order should everything happen in before the shoot?

Declutter, then clean, then stage. Doing them in any other sequence wastes the middle step.

Declutter first, always, because cleaning around objects that are about to leave means cleaning twice. Every surface you clear becomes a surface I can do in one pass. Photographers want worktops nearly empty, mantelpieces down to two or three items, no fridge magnets, no toiletries on any windowsill, no toothbrushes visible, no bins in shot, no cables snaking to a router.

Clean the day before, not the morning of. Grout and sealant need to dry before they photograph properly – freshly cleaned silicone looks dark and wet on camera, which reads as mould. A wet bath surround at nine in the morning ruins the shot. I’ve had to explain that at the door in Muswell Hill while a photographer waited in his car.

Save staging for the last hour. Beds made with the duvet properly squared, curtains fully drawn back and hooked, all lamps on, toilet seats down, every bulb in the house working and preferably the same colour temperature. That last one matters more than any cleaning I do – a room with one warm bulb and one cold one photographs as two different rooms bolted together and no editing will fix it.

The forty minutes before the photographer knocks

Open every curtain and blind to their full width. Turn on every light including the extractor light over the hob. Put the loo seats down and the bins outside the front door. Take the fridge magnets off, take the tea towels off the oven handle, take the bin bags out of view, take the car off the driveway.

Then leave the house, or at least go and stand in the garden. Vendors hovering in doorways slow a shoot down and photographers stop asking to move things.

Does a clean house sell faster, or is that agent talk?

It doesn’t sell faster. It gets more clicks, which is a different thing and the thing that matters at the photography stage.

Portal search results are a grid of thumbnails and the decision to click takes under a second. A bright, uncluttered, glare-free lead image gets clicked; a dim one with a cluttered worktop gets scrolled past. What happens after the click is about price, floorplan and postcode, and no amount of cleaning has ever moved those. A spotless two-bed in Tooting Bec still sits at nineteen weeks if it’s fifty grand ahead of the comparables.

So the return on a pre-photography clean is measured in viewings booked, not in the price achieved. Budget accordingly – half a day, targeted, on the rooms that appear in the first four images.

What to do about the second clean

Book it for the day before the first viewings, not now. Photos are shot once. Viewings run for weeks and people open cupboards, look under sinks, and put their heads round the airing cupboard door. That’s when the whole-house clean earns something, and it’s a different job with a different price.

One last thing on timing. Photographers book by half-day slots and the good ones shoot between ten and two in winter for the light, which means your cleaner needs to be finished by nine at the latest and preferably the previous evening. I’ve been asked twice to work in the same room as a photographer, once in a garden flat in Maida Vale where we spent an hour politely orbiting each other, and the pictures were fine but the kitchen wasn’t finished until after he’d shot it. Book the two on separate days if the diary allows it.

The photographer will be gone by half ten. Put the bins back.

You can also check my previous article in which I discuss what to do cleaning-wise when a flatmate moves out mid-tenancy.

What Does a One-Off Clean Actually Cover When a Flatmate Moves Out Mid-Tenancy?

“He’s out on the 14th and none of us are speaking to him, so can you just do his room and the bathroom, and can you be there before he collects the deposit?”

That was a Tuesday call from a four-bed off Junction Road in Archway, and I’ve had some version of it maybe two hundred times. Somebody leaves in the middle of a joint tenancy, everyone else stays, and a cleaning company gets asked to draw a line under something that was never about cleaning.

So here’s the scope, plainly, and what falls outside it.

What are you paying for when a flatmate leaves mid-tenancy?

The vacated room, and then everything that room has been quietly exporting into the rest of the flat for two years.

The room itself is the easy half. Empty, it’s a couple of hours – walls wiped where the bed head was, skirtings, window and reveals, the top of the door frame, radiator front and back with a fin brush, wardrobe interior including the base where the shoes lived, light fitting, sockets and switch plates, and then floors last. If it’s carpet and the leaver had a desk chair on it, expect a bald patch that no amount of extraction will lift. If it’s laminate, expect the strip along the skirting where the vacuum never reached.

What people underestimate is the shared load. A person moving out doesn’t just vacate a bedroom – they stop using a shelf in the fridge, a cupboard in the kitchen, half a shower rack, a hook in the hall, a corner of the freezer with three ice-burned bags of peas in it. All of that gets discovered on the day the room empties, and all of it is somebody’s job.

I price mid-tenancy work in three bands. Room only. Room plus the shared surfaces that person owned. Room plus shared surfaces plus a proper kitchen and bathroom reset, which is the one that costs real money and the one that most flats need, because nobody has moved the microwave in eighteen months.

What the leaver’s shelf usually looks like

I opened a fridge in a maisonette near Rye Lane last winter where the departing tenant’s shelf had a jar of harissa with a lid welded on, a bag of spinach that had turned to liquid inside an unbroken bag, and a Tupperware nobody would claim. Under it, at the back of the glass, a brown ring about the size of a beer mat that had been through several heating cycles.

Twenty minutes of that shelf. Forty for the drawer beneath. That’s not what you’re buying when you book “his room.”

Which parts of a shared flat get missed until somebody moves out?

The bits nobody owns. In a family home there’s usually one person who feels responsible for the whole thing. In a four-way houseshare, responsibility stops at the edge of your own stuff, and the gaps between people’s stuff go uncleaned for the length of the tenancy.

Extractor hood filters. The gap between the cooker and the counter. The washing machine detergent drawer, which in a shared flat is nearly always furred with a grey-pink biofilm because four people use four different products and nobody rinses it. Kettle limescale, which in most of north London means a chalk lining after six months. The underside of the toilet seat hinges. The bathroom extractor grille. Behind the sofa. The bin cupboard floor.

Move-out is the only moment when a houseshare will collectively agree to pay for that, which is why I push people toward the third band even though they call asking for the first. A vacated room is the excuse – the flat is the actual job.

The half-hour that changes the flat most

If you only buy one extra thing, buy the kitchen degrease. Not the surfaces you can see. The wall behind the hob, the cupboard doors directly above and to either side, the hood filters soaked rather than wiped, and the ceiling above the cooker, which in a flat where people fry things is tacky to the touch and holds a film that everything airborne then sticks to.

That’s the surface that makes a kitchen feel different afterwards. Wiped worktops last four hours.

Does a mid-tenancy clean protect anybody’s deposit?

Not the way people think it does, and this is where I spend the most time on the phone talking somebody out of spending money.

In a joint tenancy – one agreement, all names on it – the deposit is one deposit and it doesn’t get released when one person goes. It sits with the scheme until the whole tenancy ends. Whatever the leaver pays me on the 14th has no bearing on what gets deducted in two years’ time, because the check-out inventory will be compared against the check-in inventory, and by then somebody else will have burned the worktop and hung a shelf badly.

There’s also the legal angle, which letting agents are still fuzzy on. The Tenant Fees Act 2019 bans landlords and agents in England from requiring tenants to make payments to third parties as a condition of the tenancy, and requiring you to hire a professional cleaning company – or produce a receipt proving you did – falls inside that ban. It came into force for new tenancies in England on 1 June 2019 and extended to existing tenancies from 1 June 2020. What does still stand is the obligation to return the property in the condition it was let in, and a landlord can claim against the deposit for cleaning if it isn’t.

So if an agent has told your outgoing flatmate that the agreement obliges him to book a professional clean of his room mid-tenancy, he can ignore that, and any invoice I give him is worth nothing to a dispute panel two years from now. That’s not what you’re buying.

What the invoice is good for

Peace between the people still living there. That’s a real thing and worth paying for on its own terms – four people who were about to have a fight about a fridge shelf instead have a clean flat and a receipt split four ways. I’ve had repeat customers come out of exactly that, in a flat on Chatsworth Road in Hackney where I now go monthly. Nobody there could tell you what the deposit position is. The flat’s clean, though.

When should you skip the clean and just do it yourselves?

More often than I’d like to admit in writing.

If the leaver kept a tidy room, the carpet is under three years old and there’s no smoking or pets involved, a room-only clean is three of you and a Saturday morning. You’ll do a worse job than me on the reveals and the radiator, and it won’t matter, because nobody is inspecting it. The incoming flatmate will hang their own things on the walls within a week.

Skip it entirely if the room is being repainted. I’ve turned up to jobs in Turnpike Lane where I cleaned a room to a high standard on the Friday and a decorator put filler dust over all of it on the Monday. Sequence matters more than the clean does. Painter, then floors, then me, or don’t bother with the first visit.

The one I’d never skip: a room where somebody smoked, vaped heavily, or kept a cat. Nicotine and cat protein both go into the wall surface and the underlay, and neither leaves with a hoover. That’s a specific piece of work with sugar soap and an enzyme treatment on the floor, and if you skip it the next occupant will smell it in week three and blame the building.

The jobs I’ll split rather than take whole

I’d rather do half a job properly than a whole one thinly. If the budget is a hundred and fifty quid and the flat needs four hundred quid of work, I’ll do the room and the kitchen and leave the bathroom, and say so on the quote. What I won’t do is spread the same money across every room and hand back a flat that looks fractionally better everywhere and properly clean nowhere. Three-bedroom flat in Colliers Wood last March, exactly that conversation, and they took the split. That’s not what you’re buying either – the thin version.

Who pays, and how long does it take?

The leaver pays for their room. The house pays for the shared work. That’s the split that causes the least resentment, and it’s the one I suggest when a group asks me to arbitrate, which they do more often than you’d expect for a man with a van full of microfibre.

On timing: a single room in a shared flat runs two to three hours for one cleaner. Room plus shared surfaces, half a day. The full reset with kitchen and bathroom in a four-bed, that’s two people for six hours and I’d want the room empty of furniture, the fridge switched off and defrosted the night before, and somebody in the flat who can tell me what’s rubbish and what’s precious.

Why the day before matters more than the day itself

That last point matters more than any of the rest. I’ve binned a mug that turned out to be somebody’s dead grandmother’s, in a garden flat in Nunhead, and I have never made that mistake since. Now I ask for one person to stay in the flat for the first half hour and walk me through anything ambiguous – the box in the hall, the bike wheel behind the door, the jars on the windowsill.

Defrosting is the other one people forget. A freezer that gets switched off at nine in the morning is a puddle at eleven and still frozen solid in the drawers at one, so we work around it and the whole thing gets done badly. Switch it off the night before, put a towel down, and the appliance takes twenty minutes instead of an hour.

If the leaver’s furniture is going out the same day, book me for the afternoon. I’ve stood on a landing in Leyton for fifty minutes while two men and a wardrobe worked out the geometry of a stairwell, and that time came off the cleaning, not off the bill.

Leave the wheelie bin lid open on the morning. There’ll be more than fits.