Monster Cleaning Edgware is a small firm working houses and flats across HA8 and the edges around it. Hourly housework and handover cleans take up most weeks, with carpets, ovens and team deep cleans filling the gaps. Almost everything sits within a mile or two of Watling Street, somewhere between St Margaret’s Church on the High Street and the Green Belt at the top of Edgwarebury Lane, and spreading further has never been the plan.
What we clean, mostly
A 1920s or 1930s bay-fronted semi. That is the honest description of an average job here. The Northern line arrived in 1924 and most of the district was laid out over the next fifteen years, with solid brick spine walls, timber floor joists and generous rear plots, and a great many of those houses still carry original parquet, picture rails and a tiled path to the front door. Around that core sit the Watling Estate houses south towards Burnt Oak, the larger detached properties on the Edgwarebury lanes, the rebuilt Stonegrove and Spur Road estates, and a growing band of flats near the station. One town, four or five different kinds of morning.
The floor under the carpet decides how we work
Here is the thing we know about Edgware that a firm driving in from elsewhere does not. Lift a corner of carpet at a doorway threshold in one of these semis and you will often find parquet blocks or softwood boards that were never sealed. Unsealed blocks draw water in at their edges, swell, then cup or come away from the bitumen, and once one has lifted the bill belongs to a joiner rather than to us. So the extraction machine runs at a lower moisture setting here as standard, with extra dry passes on the way back and a slower rate of travel. The job takes longer and the floor stays flat. Sanding, sealing and repairing parquet goes to somebody who does it for a living, because we do not.
Hard water is the local constant
Between 250 and 350 ppm arrives out of Affinity Water’s north London zone. The results are predictable enough: elements fur, screens turn milky inside a couple of years, tap bases crust, and chrome loses its shine long before a tap stops working. A bathroom here therefore runs slower than the same room would in a soft water town, and the extra minutes were counted into the quoted figure rather than added on later. The same fact shapes the carpet method, since rinse water left sitting in a pile dries to a bloom and on pale wool that bloom is the first thing anybody notices.
Drives, hoses and the town centre
Most of the round is easy to park on. Nearly every house has a front drive, the van comes off the road, and the hose run to the door is short. Block paving and gravel are the two surfaces worth a moment’s thought, because a hose pulled across either brings jointing sand or loose stone into the hall, so lines run round the edge and a mat goes at the threshold. Near the station the picture changes. Barnet operates permit-controlled streets there and on the bus station approaches, the interchange forecourt is off limits, and a £1.7 billion redevelopment of the Broadwalk Centre and the transport interchange has cleared its planning hurdles, bringing 3,365 homes and an underground bus garage. Hoardings, diverted access and construction dust will be part of that end of town for years. We route round it, and we will say when the dust is about to undo the inside of the glass within a fortnight.
An owner occupied patch, and what that does to the diary
Plenty of cleaning firms describe every town as though it were full of six month tenancies. Edgware is not one of them. It is predominantly owner occupied family housing with a narrower rented layer, mostly newer flats near the station and split houses on the road towards Burnt Oak, so regular housework and one off deep cleans outweigh tenancy work in the book. Handover jobs come in every week and they matter, but they are the smaller half, and saying so beats dressing the round up as something it is not.
Two scheduling facts follow the calendar rather than the housing. Friday afternoons finish early here and Saturdays are quiet across much of the round, so a Friday job wants a morning. And the fortnight before Passover in spring is our busiest run of the year, with deep cleans taking kitchens, ovens and every cupboard at once. That window fills months ahead, and February is not early to ring.
Keys, and keeping one cleaner on one house
Wherever the rota permits, a house keeps its cleaner. Households prefer it and the visit runs faster, because a cleaner who already knows which cupboard the bin liners live in does not spend ten minutes a week hunting for them. Keys either come to us or go in a safe by the door. What we hold has a number on the tag and nothing naming the address. Alarm codes are written down once and never spoken over a phone. Sickness and holidays bring a call the evening before, plus a choice between cover and a moved visit; nobody appears unannounced. Kit and products come with the cleaner, or yours get used on request, which households ask for over allergies, waxed floors and stone worktops.
Everything is priced in public
Handover cleans settle on size before a van is booked, from £156 at a studio up to £425 at four bedrooms, with the oven and the floors quoted as their own lines. Hourly work runs at £22 per cleaner weekly and £24 fortnightly, and ironing at £12 an hour comes out of those same hours. Carpets go by the room from £36, and rugs at £35 or £51 by size. Ovens are per appliance, from £77 up to £143 on a two oven AGA, with £23 buying a hob and £28 an extractor. Upholstery is per piece, a dining chair being the £13 at the bottom of it. Deep cleans come to £26 a cleaner an hour with £30 on top for kit, so a pair across three hours is £186 and the ceiling sits at £498. One off jobs meet a £67 floor while hourly work sits outside it. Not one figure waits behind a phone call. All of it is printed on the prices page, and it holds on the day unless something gets added to the job.
Hours, and no weekend rate
Seven days, 8am to 8pm, one rate throughout. Sunday bills like Tuesday and an evening bills like a morning. Payment comes on completion by card, transfer or cash, Visa, Mastercard and Amex all accepted, and domestic work needs no deposit.
What we will not claim
Some marks are permanent and pretending otherwise helps nobody. Scorching on a worktop. Colour bled from a rug backing down into the carpet under it. Bleach spots. Urine that reached the underlay. A shower screen that has etched rather than scaled. Each one gets a genuine attempt and you hear on the day which held. Nor is the deposit ours to promise, because a clerk and an agent settle that between themselves, and money comes off for arrears and for damage every bit as readily as for dirt. Then the no list proper: no ladder work beyond a two step, no gutters, no glass outside above ground level, no gardens, no garages cleared, no rubbish past a bag or two, no live building sites.
When we get it wrong
48 hours, 020 8077 1591, and somebody comes back to re clean whatever was marked down. Nothing to pay and no form to complete. Where a clerk raised the point, it is the quickest route for everybody. Opening hours are on the contact page, and our terms hold the small print.
The round
Burnt Oak, Canons Park, Queensbury and Edgwarebury in HA8, Stanmore in HA7 on the Harrow side, and Mill Hill in NW7. One list of figures, nothing added for the miles. What each of the six mostly wants doing is set out on the areas page, while the services page works through the five jobs themselves.