End of tenancy cleaning in Edgware

End of tenancy cleaning is the handover clean that gets checked against an inventory before a deposit is released. Monster Cleaning Edgware bands it on bedroom count rather than selling hours, so the number is settled on the phone and not on the day. £156 covers a studio, £207 a one bedroom, £243 two bedrooms. The oven and the floors are quoted as their own lines, because a fair share of handovers in HA8 need neither.

The bands

Each of those is a finished figure rather than a starting position. Bedrooms are what the count runs on, so a second bathroom leaves the band alone while a loft room let as a bedroom pushes it up one. Hip to gable conversions with a rear dormer are all over these streets, so mention yours. Tell us the real room count and the number stands. Where we misread the hours, that comes off our margin instead of your invoice.

Where the handover work here actually comes from

Worth being straight about this, because plenty of cleaning firms write up every town as though it were full of six month tenancies. Edgware is not one. It is largely owner occupied family housing, so tenancy jobs are the smaller half of the diary and they arrive from a narrow band: the new flats going up near the station, the split houses on the road south towards Burnt Oak, and the newer blocks at Mill Hill East. Agents put a good share of those through us between tenants and the outgoing tenant never meets us. Where an inventory firm has been named, pass the name on. One or two of them go over window runners and the top edges of internal doors with a torch, and knowing that beforehand is more useful than reading it later.

What the banded figure covers

Kitchen first, because that is where the hours disappear. Units come out and get cleaned on both faces, runners and hinge recesses included, along with the grease line on the top edge of the doors that nobody looks at. Cupboard tops degreased. The extractor filter goes for a hot soak and the hob surface comes back to metal. A fridge or freezer gets done where it has been emptied, switched off and left to defrost overnight; still running with food in it, we leave it and note that on the sheet. Bathrooms follow. After that the dry work through the property, so light fittings, door tops, skirtings, radiator backs, frames, sills, switch plates and the inside face of every pane. Floors go last, working from the top of the house down.

Glass is done on the inside only. A 1930s semi with a deep front bay and original sashes wants a pole and the right insurance for the outer face, and any firm folding that into a fixed cleaning fee is telling you something about the rest of the quote.

The oven and the floors are their own lines

This is where our list differs from a lot of others, and the reason is simple. Plenty of Edgware handovers give back a kitchen with a decent oven in it and hard floors throughout, so bundling both into the band would mean charging those households for work they never wanted. The oven therefore goes on as a job in its own right: £77 buys a single, £110 a double, £114 a 90cm range and £143 a two oven AGA. Lifting burner caps and crowns off to soak with the oven parts is the £23 hob clean, and taking an extractor housing apart rather than only its filter is £28. Floors start at £36 for a bedroom, with £43 on a living room, £61 where two rooms have been knocked into one, £41 for each flight of stairs, and loose rugs at £35 or £51 by size. Read the check-in report before deciding to skip them, since most inventories round here that mention carpet ask for extraction rather than a vacuum.

Scale is the item most likely to cost you money

Affinity Water feeds this zone at somewhere between 250 and 350 ppm. Leave a shower screen alone for two years and it wears a white bloom. Tap bases crust up. There is a line under the toilet rim no cloth will reach. None of that is dirt in the ordinary sense, which is exactly why scrubbing achieves nothing: the mineral has bonded to the surface and wants an acid gel, a plastic blade and about twenty minutes of leaving it well alone. Those twenty minutes are inside the quoted figure. Where a screen has gone untouched for years, we say on the day whether it is going to come clear or whether the glass itself has etched, because an etched screen is a change in the glass rather than a coating on it.

The floor under the carpet in an interwar semi

Most rented houses on this patch went up between 1924 and the late 1930s, on timber joists, and a surprising number still carry their original parquet or softwood boards beneath a carpet somebody laid in the eighties. At a check-out that matters more than on any other job we do. Over-wet an unsealed block floor and the blocks swell, cup and lift off the bitumen, and a lifted block is a deposit deduction rather than a cleaning result. So the extraction runs at a lower moisture setting with extra dry passes coming back, and where the carpet is being pulled up anyway we will say so and spare you the money. Lift a corner at the doorway threshold before you ring and you will usually know what you are dealing with.

Where the van stands

Easy north of the town centre. Nearly every house has a front drive, the van comes off the road, and there is barely a walk from the kerb. It changes near the station. Barnet operates permit-controlled streets around there and along the bus station approaches, and Edgware bus station moves something in the region of 23,000 passengers a day, which is a fair guide to how welcome a parked van is on the interchange forecourt. The Broadwalk Centre works shift the access on top of that. Give us the street when you book. The permit is sorted at our end and it never lands on your bill.

A handover clean set against a deep clean

These two get muddled on the phone most weeks and the difference is worth ninety seconds. A handover clean is banded, written against an inventory somebody else drew up, and aimed at an empty property. A one off deep clean is sold by the team hour from £186 and aimed at a home that is still lived in. Builders just gone, or a landlord holding a house empty between lets, and the deep clean fits. Keys going back with a clerk booked in, and it does not. The banded figure usually works out cheaper anyway, since two bedrooms is £243 however the day runs.

Booking it around the week

Come after the removals van rather than before it. Working around boxes happens often enough, but an empty property gives a better result and leaves a clerk less to write down. Two things shape which morning we can offer. Friday afternoons finish early on this round and Saturdays are quiet across much of it, so a Friday check-out wants a morning slot arranged early in the week. Spring is the other one. The fortnight before Passover is the tightest stretch of our year, so a March or April handover is worth pencilling in during February.

What pushes a job past the standard shape

Three things, and we would rather raise them on the call. Furniture still in the property is the first, because cleaning round it produces a worse result for the same money. Grease baked behind a hob for two years is the second. Mould grown into bathroom silicone is the third and the one people forget: the surface will come clean, the cause will not, and blackened sealant wants cutting out and replacing by somebody else. Garages, lofts and conservatory roofs sit outside the band. Rubbish is not ours to remove either, because there is no waste carrier licence on the van, so anything being abandoned needs to go before we arrive.

Some marks stay. Scorching on a worktop. Colour that has bled from a rug backing down into the carpet. Bleach spots. Scale that has been growing under a tap for a decade. Each gets a genuine attempt and you are told which ones held before we leave.

If the report goes against us

Call within 48 hours, read out the line the clerk wrote, and somebody comes back to do that item again for nothing. It happens a handful of times a year rather than a handful of times a month. What cannot be put right afterwards is an item nobody asked for, so where an agent’s list stretches to a garage, a balcony or a shared stair, raise it at the booking. The deposit itself is nobody’s to promise. A clerk and an agent decide that between them, and money gets held back for damage, missing items and arrears at least as readily as for dirt.

Where we do this

HA8 and the edges around it: Burnt Oak, Canons Park, Queensbury and Edgwarebury, plus Stanmore in HA7 and Mill Hill in NW7. Same list of figures across all of it and nothing added for the miles. Phones and vans run 8am to 8pm every day of the week at one rate. Ring 020 8077 1591, or the services page sets out what each job gets through.

Questions we get asked

What is included in an end of tenancy clean in Edgware?

The property entire: kitchen units on both faces, appliances, bathrooms taken back through the scale, skirtings, door tops, frames, sills, inside glass, floors last. On this round the oven and the carpets are quoted apart rather than folded into the band.

How much is it for a two bedroom flat?

£243, banded on bedrooms and settled before the booking. An extra bathroom leaves it where it is. A loft room being let as a bedroom moves it up, so raise that on the phone rather than on the doorstep.

Why is the oven priced separately?

Because a good many Edgware handovers do not need one doing. £77 buys a single, £110 a double, £114 a 90cm range and £143 a two oven AGA, added to the same visit. Booking it together saves a second trip rather than money.

Does somebody need to be at the property?

No, and usually nobody is. Keys tend to sit with the agent or with us and get collected afterwards. You get a note at the end listing whatever refused to shift, which beats standing in a hallway watching.

Can you clean carpets that are laid over parquet?

Yes, with the moisture setting down and more dry passes coming back. Soak an unsealed block floor and it swells and lifts, and that is joinery rather than cleaning. Tell us what is underneath when you book.

What happens if the agent picks fault?

Call inside 48 hours with the line from the report and we return to redo that item free. It will not cover wear that was there beforehand, and it cannot cover anything we were never asked to touch.