Our phone starts on the 27th and doesn’t stop until about the 8th. Same call every year: the flat feels wrong, there’s a smell in the kitchen nobody can place, and there are people arriving on New Year’s Eve. Half of those callers don’t need us. They need to do four things in the right order and open a window.
A flat is a harder problem than a house at this point in the year. No garage to put boxes in, no back garden to shake a rug over, one extractor, and radiators that have been on since the 20th with six people breathing over them.
What needs doing first while the flat is still full of Christmas?
Clear before you clean. This sounds obvious and it’s the step everyone skips, because clearing is boring and wiping feels productive.
Cards, wrapping, the bags of packaging that migrate behind the sofa – out first. Then decorations, which in a one-bed off Wightman Road in Harringay means the tree comes down before the hoover comes out, not the other way round. Anything you clean around, you will clean again.
Bin the food last. Fridge and freezer are a separate job and doing them on the 27th, while you’re still eating leftovers, wastes an hour. Give it until the 30th, then take every shelf out, wash them in the bath rather than the sink, and wipe the seals while they’re empty. The rubber gasket round a fridge door collects more than the shelves do and it’s the part nobody looks at.
The order that stops you repeating yourself
Top down, dry before wet, floors last. Ceilings and light fittings if you’re doing them at all, then shelves and surfaces, then upholstery, then hard floors, then carpet. Every professional does it this way for one reason: dust falls.
The Christmas variation is that the tree comes out before any of it, and the kitchen gets done separately at the end, because kitchen grease travels on a cloth and you don’t want it on your bookshelves.
One more thing on order. Strip the guest bedding on the morning your guests leave, not the following week. Damp sheets left folded on a sofa bed for five days in a flat with the heating on will smell, and that’s a fifteen-minute job you’re turning into a wash-and-air problem.
How do you get pine needles, sap and glitter out of a flat?
Needles first, and the mistake is going straight in with the vacuum. Dry needles snap and work down into carpet pile, and a Dyson head pushes them deeper before it lifts them. Rubber squeegee or a stiff hand brush, dragged across the pile, brings them up. Then vacuum. That’s a ten-minute job done properly and a fortnight of finding needles in the bath if it isn’t.
For a Nordmann fir in a second-floor flat on Roman Road, the drop zone is the whole route from the living room to the front door, because you have to carry it out and it sheds all the way. Lay an old sheet down before you move it. Ten minutes of preparation saves you doing the communal stairs as well.
Sap is the one that ruins things. It’s resin, and water does nothing to it. Cheap surgical spirit on a cotton pad, dabbed rather than rubbed, breaks it down on hard floors and on synthetic carpet. Work from the outside of the mark inwards.
Sap on a wool rug
Wool is different and needs care, because surgical spirit will strip lanolin and leave a patch that looks lighter than everything around it and stays that way. Freeze the sap instead – a bag of peas from the freezer held on it for ten minutes – then crack the hardened resin off with your thumbnail and lift the residue with a barely damp cloth and a drop of wool detergent.
Glitter, I have no good answer for. Nobody does. Sellotape wrapped sticky-side-out round your hand gets maybe eighty per cent of it and the rest you’ll find in June. Anyone who tells you they have a method for glitter is selling something.
What does a week of roasting do to a small kitchen?
More than people think, and it doesn’t stay in the oven.
Roasting a bird at 190 for four hours puts fat into the air, and in a galley kitchen with a recirculating hood – which is most converted flats in London, because a ducted extractor needs an external wall – that fat lands on the cupboard doors above the hob, the ceiling directly over it, and the top edge of the fridge. It goes tacky within a fortnight and it grabs dust. That grey-brown film on the top of your kitchen units in January is Christmas dinner.
Hot degreaser, a cloth, and patience. Warm water with a good squirt of washing-up liquid handles most of it if you let it sit for two minutes before wiping. Sugar soap for the ceiling if the paint will take it. Test on a corner behind the door.
The oven itself is worth paying somebody for, and I say that as someone whose team charges for it. Carbonised fat on a glass door does not come off with a supermarket spray and a Sunday afternoon. A dip-tank operator does the shelves properly and it’s £60 to £90 in most of Greater London. That’s money well spent once a year and January is exactly when to spend it.
Fat down the sink in a converted flat
Do not pour goose fat or turkey drippings down the sink. In a house you’d get away with it for years. In a Victorian conversion in Clapham, where your kitchen waste joins the same stack as the two flats below, congealed fat sits at the first bend and collects everything that follows it – and the flat that floods is rarely the one that poured it.
Pour it into a jar, let it set, put it in the general waste. If you’ve already done it, a kettle of boiling water with a good measure of washing-up liquid, run for a minute or two, will move a fresh deposit before it hardens. Once it’s set solid, that’s a plumber and a shared bill.
Why does the flat feel damp in the first week of January?
Because it is. You’ve had extra bodies in it, you’ve been cooking twice as much as usual, and it’s been too cold to open anything.
A four-person Christmas in a two-bed flat in Northfields puts several litres of water into the air a day – breathing, showers, boiling pans, the shower nobody ran the extractor for. Then the guests leave, you put three loads of washing on the radiators because it’s raining, and by the 5th there’s black spotting in the corner of the bedroom that wasn’t there in December.
Wipe it, yes. Diluted bleach or a proper mould spray on the plaster, left to dwell, then wiped. But the wiping is the smaller half of the job.
Open windows for fifteen minutes twice a day even in January, and especially after cooking. Run the bathroom extractor for twenty minutes after a shower rather than switching it off with the light. Dry washing in the bathroom with the door shut and the fan running, not on the living room radiator. None of that costs anything.
Guest bedding, sofa beds and the airing problem
Sofa bed mattresses are foam, they’re thin, and they hold whatever went into them. A sofa bed slept in for four nights over Christmas and then folded away wet-ish is the reason a lot of living rooms smell faintly of nothing-you-can-identify by February.
Open it up. Leave it open for a full day with the window on the latch. Vacuum both sides with the upholstery tool, and if there’s a smell, bicarbonate of soda left on it for a few hours will take the edge off before you fold it away.
Same with the airing cupboard. Everything that came out of it for guests should go back in dry, not warm-and-damp.
What’s worth booking a cleaner for in January, and what isn’t?
The oven, as above. A full deep clean if you’ve got a New Year gathering and no time – that’s a fair use of money and we do a lot of them between the 28th and the 30th.
Carpet cleaning, though, I’d tell you to wait on. Every January we get asked to steam-clean living room carpets after a spilt glass of red on the 25th, and a hot-water extraction clean puts a lot of moisture into a flat that’s already struggling to dry out. In a ground-floor flat off Sudbury Court Road with single glazing, that carpet will take two days to dry and you’ll have made the damp worse to fix a stain. Treat the stain now with a cloth and cold water, blotting rather than scrubbing, and book the carpet for March. That’s a five-minute job on the day and an expensive one in three months if you leave it under a rug and forget.
What a January deep clean should cover
Kitchen units inside and out, oven and hob, bathroom including the grout and the shower screen, all skirtings, behind and under furniture that can be moved by two people, window sills and the inside of the glass, and the bits of floor that have been under a tree stand or a stack of presents since the middle of December.
What it shouldn’t include: moving your furniture into another room, taking down decorations, or your bins. Those are yours, and any quote that promises otherwise has been written by somebody who has never done the work.
The flats that need us least in January are the ones where somebody opened a window on Boxing Day.