A one off deep clean is sold in team time rather than by property size. Monster Cleaning Edgware will not book smaller than a pair of cleaners over three hours. At £26 each an hour, plus £30 covering machines and detergents, that comes to £186. Two people working a house together for three hours get through more than one person manages in six, which is why it is built as a team job. Plenty of houses here want longer, and you will hear that during the call rather than at four in the afternoon.
The arithmetic, written out
| Team booked | What it comes to, kit included |
|---|---|
| 2 cleaners, 3 hours | £186 |
| 2 cleaners, 4 hours | £238 |
| 2 cleaners, 5 hours | £290 |
| 3 cleaners, 3 hours | £264 |
| 3 cleaners, 4 hours | £342 |
| 3 cleaners, 6 hours | £498 |
The ceiling of £498 puts three cleaners in for six hours, which handles a four or five bedroom house in one day rather than a room at a time. Beyond that we would sooner run two mornings than have three people waiting on the same bathroom. Drop the £30 and use your own machine and products instead, which households ask for over allergies and over stone worktops, and you are then paying for labour only. Finishing early means paying the shorter time. The £67 floor on one off work is met before anyone has hung a coat up.
Three services, and which one you actually want
An hourly cleaner holds a house at whatever level it already sits. This service raises the level, and its list is everything a three hour visit never reaches: inside the kitchen cupboards, the greasy strip where wall units meet the ceiling, behind the fridge and the washing machine, door tops and frames, shower grout, sash runners, light fittings, radiator fins, wardrobe tops. None of it wants doing weekly. It piles up quietly across a year or two, and then it wants a morning and more than one pair of hands. Quite a few callers asking for this would be better served by a standing two hour slot every week, which is the regular service, £22 an hour per cleaner and a small fraction of a team booking.
Where keys are going back to a landlord, the banded handover clean fits better and usually costs less. Two bedrooms is £243, and the scope follows an inventory rather than whichever things happen to be irritating you.
Three hours, two cleaners: the honest scope
One bedroom flat, front to back, provided nothing has been allowed to go badly. Two bedrooms needs the fourth hour or a third cleaner. Where there is a second bathroom, or a kitchen nobody has properly opened in a year, put an hour on and do not argue about it. Book long. Finishing early beats losing the afternoon with a bathroom half done, and the bill follows the hours worked.
The order of work
High to low, wet before dry, one room finished before the next gets opened. Cobwebs and light fittings come off first. Wardrobe tops and door frames next, then walls and doors, then hand height, then the floors. Grease and scale live in the kitchen and the bathroom, so those two rooms take the largest share of any booking. The pair work separate rooms rather than the same one. In the van: a step ladder, an extraction hoover on a HEPA filter, a steamer for grout and tile, and cloths colour coded so nothing that has touched a toilet later touches a worktop. Your £30 buys that.
The bathroom is the room that eats the budget
Scale round a tap base and down in grout gets softened, left to itself while the product works, agitated, and rinsed off properly at the end. That last rinse takes as long as everything ahead of it. At 250 to 350 ppm out of the Affinity Water main that is arithmetic, not pessimism. One bathroom gets an hour. Two hours where the tiling runs to the ceiling and nothing has been descaled since the shower was fitted. An ensuite off a loft conversion adds another forty minutes, and this district has a great many of those. Where a screen has gone years untouched, you get told whether the glass will come clear or whether it has etched.
After the builders, and the town centre works
Building work is the commonest reason this phone rings, and there is plenty of it about. Loft conversions with rear dormers, side returns, kitchens ripped out and replaced, and up at Stanmore whole houses reworked at once. Plaster dust behaves nothing like household dust. It hangs in the air for hours and settles again after the first wipe, so a room gets done, left, and done again, and wet cloths are the only method because a hoover mostly moves it around. Expect to find some on a shelf a fortnight later that you would have sworn was finished. We clean finished work rather than live sites, and construction waste goes to somebody else.
The other dust source is the town centre. A £1.7 billion redevelopment of the Broadwalk Centre and the transport interchange has cleared its planning hurdles, with 3,365 homes and an underground bus garage in the approved scheme, so the streets nearest the station face years of hoardings, diverted access and fine grit that settles in window runners and across every horizontal surface. Households close in tend to book once the worst of a phase has passed rather than fight it weekly, and we will say honestly when the timing looks wrong.
Old floors set a limit on the wet work
A great many interwar semis here still carry parquet or original boards beneath the carpet, and a deep clean that soaks a floor like that does genuine damage. Water gets controlled on those and we flag it before starting. Waxed floors are left alone entirely, since stripping and rewaxing belongs to a specialist and we are not one. Where carpets form part of the same day they are quoted apart from £36 a bedroom and left until last, so nothing gets walked across a wet pile.
Spring is the fortnight that books out
Our busiest run of the year is the two weeks before Passover, when the diary fills with deep cleans covering kitchens, ovens and every cupboard. It goes months ahead and it is the one window where short notice simply does not work. February is not early to ring for an April date. Outside it, a week’s notice generally does the job, though two free cleaners on the same morning are harder to find than one, so Saturdays want a little more warning.
Left out of the price
Floors and oven interiors are separate jobs. A single oven is £77 and can join the same visit, which is worth doing because the dip tank achieves in twenty minutes what a cleaner cannot in three hours. Outside glass above the ground floor is out, and so is anything wanting more than a two step. Bagged rubbish goes out with the bins; a skip’s worth wants a skip and a licence we do not hold. Lofts, garages and stored boxes get left alone, because deciding what is kept belongs to the householder rather than to a cleaner. Where a house has been hoarded we come and look before quoting instead of guessing down a phone line.
Where the big bookings land
Three cleaner jobs cluster at the north end of the patch, along the Edgwarebury lanes where houses run to five bedrooms on long plots, and on the hill at Stanmore. Down towards Burnt Oak and in the flats near the station a pair for three or four hours is the usual shape. Same rate everywhere and nothing added for the miles. The services page runs through the rest of what we take on.
Questions we get asked
What does a one off deep clean cover?
One visit by a team taking everything a routine clean leaves out: inside cupboards, behind appliances, skirtings by hand, light fittings, window runners, grout. £186 buys the smallest booking, two cleaners across three hours with kit in.
What is the largest booking you take?
Three cleaners for six hours at £498, which handles a four or five bedroom house inside a day. Anything above that we would rather split across two mornings, since more cleaners than that in one house spend the time queueing rather than cleaning.
How many hours will my house want?
A two bedroom flat in reasonable order usually takes two cleaners for three or four hours. A four bedroom house that has gone years without one is nearer three cleaners for four hours at £342. A few questions on the call settles it.
What does the £30 pay for?
Machines, pads, chemicals and consumables, charged once for the job instead of by the hour. Use your own kit and products and it comes off the bill, which households ask for over allergies and over stone worktops.
Do you take on after builders work?
Yes, once the trades have gone and the site is safe. Plaster dust resettles after the first pass, so rooms get done twice and a job following a loft conversion tends to run to five hours. Construction waste is not ours to move.
When should a spring deep clean be booked?
February for an April date. The fortnight before Passover is the busiest stretch of our year and books out months ahead, so late requests in that window get turned down rather than squeezed in badly.