Canberra does winter properly. The heating runs for months, the windows stay shut, and the house lives on recirculated air while the frost sits on the lawn outside. None of that is dirt exactly. It is more that the house has been closed up, and a closed-up house collects things in the places nobody looks at until the light changes.
Then September arrives, the sun gets into rooms it has not reached since April, and the house looks tired. That is the moment people ring us. This post is about what to do with that moment, and which parts of it are worth your own Saturday and which are worth paying for.
Where a winter goes
Start by walking the house with the windows open. The list nearly always comes out the same way.
- Glass. Condensation runs down the inside of cold windows all winter and leaves a film. The tracks underneath fill with the grit that blows in, and the fly screens go grey. Clean glass with a dirty track is not clean glass, which is why our window cleaning covers the tracks, frames and fly screens as part of the job rather than as an extra.
- The eaves and the outside of the house. Cobwebs build under the eaves and around the frames all winter, and nobody sees them until they are standing in the garden in the sun. They come off with a pole from the ground, and it is one of the quickest things on the list to have done.
- Heater dust. Anything that has been blowing warm air for months has been blowing dust with it. Vents, the tops of doors, the skirting boards and the ceiling corners collect it, and it is the thing that makes a room feel stale even after it has been vacuumed.
- The kitchen you cooked in all winter. Ovens, rangehoods and the splashback carry a season of roasts. This is the one most people put off, and it is the one a cleaner with the right products gets through fastest.
- Bathrooms. Shower glass, grout and the extractor fan cover. Warm, wet and shut all winter is exactly the environment mould likes.
Do it yourself, or book it
Most of that list is a weekend if you have the weekend. The wiping and the vacuuming are yours if you want them. What is worth booking is the work that needs a machine or a pole: a rotary machine on a hard floor, a cobweb pole to the eaves, and the oven, which is the job people put off longest.
Our spring and one-off clean is priced by the hour for that reason. No two catch-ups are the same size, so it starts at $350 plus GST for the first four hours and runs at $87.50 an hour after that, and the chemicals and equipment come with us.
How the hours get spent
The part that makes an hourly clean worth booking is what happens before anyone picks up a cloth. The cleaner talks the job through with you first, and you name what matters most: the oven, the shower glass, the window tracks, the skirting boards. That list is worked from the top. If the hours you have booked will not cover everything, you have already decided what comes first, and the cleaner gets the rest to the best state the time allows rather than skimming the whole house.
It is the same cleaner who would come fortnightly if you decided to keep going, which is often how it works out. A spring clean is the first booking for a lot of the houses on our regular round, because it draws a line: everything back to a known state, and then a regular clean holds it there.
Book it around a date, not a mood. An inspection with two weeks notice, guests arriving, a photographer booked for Thursday. A spring clean lands best when there is a day it has to be done by, and that is the first thing to tell us when you ring.
The order that works
If you are doing some of it yourself, go top to bottom and outside to inside. Eaves and cobwebs first, then windows and tracks, then the high dust, then surfaces, and floors last of all. Doing the floors first is the mistake everyone makes once. Everything you clean afterwards ends up on them.
And open the house while you do it.