Monster Cleaning Catford is a small firm working houses and flats across SE6 and out to the SE13 edge, from the bay-fronted terraces on the Corbett Estate to the flats above the shops on Rushey Green. The diary is mostly check-out cleans and hourly housework. Carpets, cookers, upholstery and the occasional team deep clean fill in round the edges of that. None of the pricing is held back for the phone call: move-outs open at £156 and weekly housework is £23 per cleaner per hour.
What Catford means on this site
SE6 in the London Borough of Lewisham, plus four short hops off the side of it: Hither Green and Ladywell in SE13, Forest Hill in SE23, and Downham in BR1 where the estate crosses into Bromley at its south-eastern corner. That is the round.
One developer set the floor plan, and it still sets the day
Archibald Corbett laid the estate out in the 1890s and 1900s: terraces and semis with front gardens, bay windows and long back gardens, sold under covenants that kept pubs off the whole estate. A hundred and thirty years later the plan of those houses is still the thing that decides how long a job takes. They are narrow at the front, with a hall running the full depth of the property and a staircase climbing straight off the front door, so hoses, buckets, machines and trays of oven parts cross that hallway on every single visit. Most have a rear side return with no gate through to the street, which means the waste water leaves by the same route the kit came in.
Round the estate sit tighter late-Victorian two-up two-downs on plots only fourteen to sixteen feet wide with barely a yard behind them, where two cleaners on the ground floor genuinely get in each other’s way. Culverley Green holds roomier Edwardian houses. Bellingham and Downham add 1920s and 1930s cottage-estate stock with long front paths and side gates. The town centre carries post-war blocks and the new apartments arriving with the regeneration. Five kinds of housing inside one postcode, and a couple of hours between the quickest and the slowest for the same job at the same price.
The hallway is the local trade skill
Almost everything awkward here traces back to that one corridor. Floor protection goes down before a single machine moves, the rooms furthest from the door are cleaned first, and the hall floor is the last surface touched in the property. Get that order wrong and you spend the afternoon walking over your own work. The exception is worth knowing: a good share of the interwar semis a mile north-east in Hither Green have a gate down the side, so the hose goes straight round to the back and never enters the hall. Which of those two you have is worth more to us than your postcode.
Hard water is the other constant
Thames Water supplies this side of the borough at around 300 ppm, so a bathroom here takes longer than the same bathroom in a soft water town. Screens cloud from the tray up. Tap bases crust over. The original glazed wall tiling that survives in plenty of these houses holds a film a cloth slides straight across without touching. What you are looking at is a mineral bonded onto the surface rather than dirt lying on it, so the answer is an acid product and the patience to let it work, and those patient minutes are inside the quoted figure from the start.
Damp ground floors by the river
The low streets near the Ravensbourne and Ladywell Fields take surface water when it rains hard, so ground floor carpets in those roads are often damp rather than simply dirty. We bring a meter and check: where the underlay is dry, extraction and a couple of hours of drying sort it, and where it is not, you hear that on the day so the right trade can follow.
The roadworks we plan around
Permission exists for the A205 to be put on a new alignment through Catford and for the Plassy Island one-way system to disappear, with highway work expected to occupy roughly two years from 2026. What we do is straightforward: check the current arrangement the day before a job rather than relying on last month’s, and give a realistic arrival window at the booking.
One cleaner per house
An address gets one person and keeps her for as long as the rota holds. Households like the arrangement and it is faster too, because by the third visit nobody is opening cupboards looking for the vacuum. Most regulars leave a key with us or fit a safe by the door, and if there is an alarm the code gets noted once at the start and is never read aloud down a phone line. Illness and holidays happen. When one does, you get a call the previous evening naming who is coming instead or offering another day, or you can skip the week. Nobody is ever sent to a house unannounced. If you would prefer a different cleaner, say so and it is arranged without any explanation being asked for.
Nothing is quoted on the doorstep
Ovens are the shortest list: £23 for a hob, £28 for an extractor, £77 and £110 for a single and a double, and £143 for a 90cm range or a two oven AGA. Floors go £36 a room, £43 a living room, £61 for a through lounge, £41 a flight, and £35 or £51 for a rug either side of 3 sq m. Upholstery runs from a £13 dining chair up to a £57 two seater, with curtains at £35 or £42 depending on the drop. Housework bills at £23 a cleaner hour weekly, £24 fortnightly, with ironing at £12 an hour on top. A team deep clean is £26 a cleaner hour with £30 of kit on top, which puts a pair over three hours at £186 and the biggest job on the books at £498. Move-outs are the exception to all of that hourly arithmetic, banded on bedrooms from £156 to £425 and settled before a van is booked. One off work has a £67 floor under it. Hourly work does not. Every line is printed on the prices page.
The clock never changes a figure
Cleaners are out from 8am until 7pm, every day of the week, and no hour or day of that has ever carried a premium. Sunday costs what Tuesday costs. So does a bank holiday. You pay by card or bank transfer. Machines and materials arrive on the van, so there is nothing for you to have bought in beforehand.
Putting things right
If a check-out report marks down something we cleaned, ring 020 3129 2846 inside 48 hours and the item is cleaned again for nothing. No form, no wrangling over who was at fault. That call is far and away the fastest route open to you, because a return visit takes an hour and a deposit dispute takes weeks. Opening hours sit on the contact page, the small print is in our terms, and each job gets a section of its own on the services page.
Questions we get asked
How far from Catford do you go?
SE6 is the core, with Hither Green and Ladywell in SE13, Forest Hill in SE23 and Downham in BR1 around it, all on one list. Sitting slightly outside is still worth a phone call, because the round moves about during the day.
Are the prices genuinely fixed?
The move-out band is. Agree the bedroom count and the figure holds unless the property turns out to be materially different from the one described on the phone. The rest is a published rate against a room, an appliance or a cleaner hour, so nothing is invented at the front door.
Can you clean a carpet that has been damp?
Often. We check the carpet and underlay with a meter first, and where the underlay is dry, extraction plus a couple of hours of drying lifts both the marks and the smell.
The check-out report flags something. What happens next?
Ring inside 48 hours and anything we cleaned that the clerk wrote up gets done again for nothing. Send us the report itself. Agents relay these things loosely and the thing they describe on the phone is often not the thing on the page.