Nobody agrees what a spring clean is.
Ring three companies and you’ll get three different jobs at three prices, and one of them will be a regular clean with a longer name on it. The word has no fixed meaning in this trade, which is why the only sensible thing to do before you book is ask for the list – the actual room-by-room list, in writing, with the exclusions on the bottom of it. A firm that has one will send it in five minutes. A firm that doesn’t is quoting on a feeling.
What’s on a spring clean checklist that isn’t on a weekly one?
Everything that gets cleaned round the rest of the year.
A weekly clean is surfaces, floors, bathroom, kitchen, bins, beds if you’ve asked. It’s maintenance, and it works on the assumption that the sofa stays where it is. A spring clean starts by moving the sofa.
The list that separates the two: inside cupboards and drawers, tops of wardrobes and kitchen units, skirting boards throughout, door frames and the tops of doors, light switches and sockets, radiators including behind them, internal windows and frames and sills, extractor filters, behind and under all movable furniture, inside the fridge and freezer, oven and hob, tiles and grout, and every soft furnishing that can take a vacuum nozzle.
Move it. That’s the whole principle and it’s the whole difference. The grey line along the wall behind a bed in a rented flat on Chatsworth Road had been there since before the current tenants moved in, because three sets of cleaners had gone round the bed rather than pulling it out.
The kitchen, in full
The kitchen is where a spring clean earns its money and where the corners get cut.
A proper one covers: inside every wall and base unit, emptied and wiped; the tops of the units where the grease film sits; the extractor filter degreased or replaced; behind the fridge and the washing machine, both pulled out; the fridge seals; the oven, hob and splashback; the sink trap and overflow; the bin itself, washed rather than re-lined; the tiles and the grout line above the worktop; and the kickboards at floor level, which come off with a firm pull and hide more than anything else in the room.
Kickboards deserve their own sentence. Underneath a run of kitchen units there is a sealed-off void a couple of inches deep, and in a flat with a washing machine under the worktop it collects powder residue, water from small leaks nobody noticed, and in older properties the occasional mouse. It comes off in about ten seconds and it is left in place on ninety per cent of the deep cleans I’ve seen quoted.
Ask specifically whether the units are emptied. Some firms wipe cupboard fronts and call it done, and on a fixed-price quote that’s often what “kitchen deep clean” means. It should say “inside and out” on the list.
Limescale is a London problem and it belongs on the checklist too. Anything north and west of the river is in hard water territory and the tap bases, shower screen and kettle need a descaler rather than a general spray.
How long should it take, and how many people should turn up?
Longer than people expect, and this is the most common disappointment.
A one-bedroom flat, occupied, reasonably kept: eight to twelve cleaner-hours. A three-bed house: eighteen to twenty-five. Those are hours, not clock time – two cleaners for six hours is twelve cleaner-hours.
A four-hour spring clean of a family house is not a spring clean. Any company selling one is selling you a very good tidy, and it will look fine on the day and identical to a regular clean by Thursday. Say no to it. If your budget is four hours, spend it on one room done properly – the kitchen, usually – rather than the whole house done thinly.
Why two cleaners beat one for the same money
Same total cost, half the disruption, and better work.
Two people move furniture properly. One person alone will decide, at about hour four, that the wardrobe is too heavy and the strip behind it doesn’t matter. Nobody is being lazy; a wardrobe is heavy. But it means the bits that make a spring clean worth booking get quietly dropped.
Two people also finish in a day, which matters in a flat you can’t leave for two days. The exception is a small one-bed with a narrow galley kitchen, where two cleaners spend half the time standing in each other’s way and one person for eight hours is the better arrangement. Any decent scheduler will tell you which yours is if you describe the layout on the phone.
What’s usually excluded, and what should you check?
Get the exclusions before you get the price, because that’s where the surprises live.
Standard exclusions across most London firms: exterior windows above ground floor, ceilings, walls beyond spot-cleaning, mould treatment, carpet or upholstery shampooing, anything requiring a ladder above two or three steps, moving heavy furniture without a second person, decluttering, laundry beyond a load, and biohazard of any kind.
Some of those are insurance and some are the Work at Height rules, and neither is a company being awkward. A cleaner on a stepladder reaching sideways to a sash window on the second floor of a Victorian terrace is exactly the situation those rules exist for.
Windows, and the sash problem
Interior glass is nearly always included. Exterior is nearly always not, and in London that’s a separate trade with poles and reach-and-wash gear.
Sashes complicate it. Modern sashes tilt in and can be done from inside, which means both faces get cleaned in one visit and it’s worth asking whether yours do – a lot of owners in a converted house on Bellenden Road had no idea theirs tilted until we showed them the catches. Original Victorian boxes don’t tilt, and the top sash in particular hasn’t been cleaned on the outside since the last scaffold went up.
If you want the outsides done, book a window cleaner for the same week and let each trade do its own job. Paying a house cleaner to attempt exterior glass gets you streaks and an argument.
What should you do before the team arrives?
Move it. Anything you want the floor cleaned under and can lift yourself – laundry baskets, the boxes under the bed, the stack of magazines on the landing.
Clear the surfaces you care about most. A cleaner faced with forty small objects on a dressing table will either move them all and put them back approximately, or clean around them. Neither is what you wanted.
Say where the stuff lives. Cupboard contents come out, get wiped, go back – and go back in the wrong order unless somebody has said which shelf is which. Ten minutes of that at the start saves an hour of you rummaging in July.
And put the pets somewhere. A cat that bolts out of an open front door while two people are carrying a mattress is a bad afternoon for everyone.
Decluttering is not cleaning
This one loses us billable hours: do not pay us to declutter. Ever.
You’re paying a trained cleaner an hourly rate to make decisions they aren’t qualified to make about objects they can’t value. They’ll be slow, because they’ll be checking with you every four minutes, and they’ll bin something you wanted. A spare room in a house in Pinner took three of us most of an afternoon that should have taken ninety minutes, because the owner hadn’t decided what was staying.
Half a Saturday with bin bags before the clean turns a mediocre spring clean into a good one, and it costs nothing.
Same with the fridge. Throw out the old food yourself. A cleaner will not bin your jars – they’ll take everything out, wipe the shelves, and put the four-year-old chutney back exactly where it was, because that’s the only safe thing to do with someone else’s food.
How is a spring clean priced in London?
Two models. Hourly, where you buy a number of cleaner-hours and agree a priority order. Fixed, where the company quotes a total for the property.
I prefer hourly and I’ll say why, though it makes quoting harder for us. A fixed price is calculated on an assumption about condition, and companies protect that assumption with exclusions and a clause about “exceptionally soiled” properties. If the flat is worse than assumed, the price changes or the corners get cut. Hourly makes the trade-off yours: you know what four more hours costs, and you decide whether the loft hatch cupboard is worth it.
Fixed pricing suits one situation well – end of tenancy, where the standard is defined by somebody else and the risk sits with the company.
Parking, access and the things that add an hour
London adds costs that have nothing to do with cleaning.
A resident permit zone with no visitor bay means the team parks a street away and carries equipment, or you buy a visitor permit from the borough. Say which it is when you book. A job on Replingham Road ran forty minutes over purely on the walk back and forth to a car in a side street.
Third-floor flat, no lift: say so. Communal entry system that needs a code: say so. Congestion charge and ULEZ apply to some teams and some vehicles, and reputable firms state it on the quote rather than adding it afterwards.
Water and power sound obvious and aren’t. Empty properties in Palmers Green have been booked for a spring clean with the stopcock off and the electricity on a dead key meter, and the team turned round and went home. Somebody paid for that morning.
Move it, say what’s behind it, and check the list before anybody leaves.