End of tenancy cleaning in Southfields

An end of tenancy clean in Southfields is priced on the number of bedrooms and agreed before anybody turns up. A studio is £156, one bedroom £207, two bedrooms £243, three £339 and four £425. One oven is inside that figure. What moves the price is carpet extraction, a second oven, or a property that has been left in a genuinely rough state, and we would rather say so on the phone than on the morning.

The number you get before we start

Those are whole-property prices. A one bedroom maisonette off Replingham Road is £207 whether we are in it for five hours or eight, and six is about average. No VAT on top. No call-out charge. The same list covers the flats around Earlsfield station and everywhere else we work in SW18.

Counting bedrooms in a Grid house

This is where phone quotes go wrong. Most of the Grid went up as a two or three bedroom terrace and then two things happened to it. Plenty were split into an upper and a lower maisonette, so the property being let is half of what the street looks like from the pavement. And on the wider roads almost everybody has gone up into the loft, which adds a bedroom under the rafters and usually a shower room with it. A two bedroom flat with a converted loft is a three bedroom job for us, because the extra stairs, the extra bathroom and the extra window all take real time. Mention the loft when you ring and the figure will be right first time.

Room by room, what gets done

• Kitchen units cleaned inside and out, tops of the wall cupboards included
• One oven, the hob and the extractor filter
• Bathrooms in full, taken down to the scale
• Skirtings, door frames, switch plates, radiator fins
• Windows on the inside, with the frames and the sills
• Floors last, on the way out

Where a place is still part furnished we clean inside the wardrobes and shift anything two people can lift without a trolley. Defrost the freezer first. Fridges and freezers get done if they are switched off and empty, which is worth sorting the night before, since a freezer still solid at nine in the morning is a freezer we cannot clean.

The bathroom takes longer than the kitchen

Thames Water supplies this whole corner of Wandsworth hard, and the shower screen is where you see it. On a check-out clean the glass and the taps are routinely the longest single task in the property, longer than the oven. We use an acid gel and a plastic blade. Steel never goes near toughened glass. Where scale has been left to etch the surface for years there is no product on the van that brings it back, and telling you that at ten in the morning is better than letting the clerk find it at four.

What sits outside the fixed price

Carpet extraction is separate here, as it is with most firms in the borough. If your inventory says the carpets were professionally cleaned at check-in, they need doing again, and a bedroom is £36 with stairs at £41 a flight. Booked alongside the move-out clean it is the same visit and the same van, so nothing gets charged twice for travel. A second oven is £77 and a 90cm range £114, both priced on the oven page. Rubbish clearance we do not touch at all.

Summer is the awkward season

Two things land on top of each other here between the middle of June and the end of July. Ordinary tenancy end dates cluster on the last Friday of the month, and the short let market around the Championships turns a run of Southfields houses over twice inside a fortnight, while ticket holders walk past the front window on their way through the streets of Wimbledon Park to the club. Slots go early. If your check-out is in the first week of July, ring us in June and we will hold you a morning.

Where we stop

We do not clear a property. Furniture, bin bags or a mattress left behind need a waste carrier licence to move, which we do not hold, and Wandsworth’s bulky collection wants booking ahead. Communal stairwells belong to the freeholder, so paying us to clean them will not help your deposit. Outside windows above the ground floor need a pole and separate insurance. Mould that has grown into old bathroom silicone comes back within weeks whatever anybody sprays on it, and the honest answer there is new sealant rather than another clean.

If the inventory clerk disagrees

Tell us inside 48 hours and we come back and redo whatever was marked down, no charge and no argument. It happens a handful of times a year. Usually it is an oven that got used once more after we left, or a window that was rained on overnight. Where a property needs better than check-out standard, before a valuation for instance, that is the one off deep clean, priced by the hour with a team of two. Everything else we charge for sits on the front page.

Questions we get asked

How much is an end of tenancy clean in Southfields?

It goes on bedrooms rather than hours. A studio is £156, one bedroom £207, two bedrooms £243, three £339 and four £425. One oven at an ordinary level of grease is inside that price, along with the insides of the windows. Carpet extraction is charged per room on top.

Does a loft conversion change the price?

Yes. A converted loft bedroom counts as a bedroom, so a two bedroom Grid terrace with a room in the roof is quoted at the three bedroom price of £339. The extra stairs and the second shower room are the reason. Tell us on the phone and the figure will not change on the day.

Is the oven included?

One oven is, at a normal level of grease. A second oven is £77 on top and a 90cm range is £114. A hob that has been burnt on for years gets looked at and quoted while we are there.

Will I definitely get my deposit back?

Nobody honest will promise that. The clerk’s report covers wear, damage and cleaning, and we only control the last of the three. What we do promise is that anything marked down on cleaning gets put right free if you tell us within 48 hours.

How far ahead should I book for a July check-out?

Two weeks. Late June and July are the busiest fortnight of our year in SW18, because ordinary tenancy end dates overlap with the short let turnarounds around the Championships, and the parking is under event controls at the same time.