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.