Cleaning services in Catford

There are six jobs on this site and each one has a number against it. You get that number during the phone call, nobody drives out to survey your house first, and it is not an opening bid that grows once a van is parked on your road.

The six, at a glance

What a bedroom count buys on a move-out

£156 at a studio, £207 at one bedroom, £243 at two, £339 at three, £425 at four. The band pays for the property brought up to the standard the check-in inventory describes: cupboards emptied then done inside and along the door tops, the fridge and freezer once they have thawed, the washing machine drawer and filter and seal, bathrooms taken back through their scale, then skirtings, frames, switch plates, wardrobe interiors, window runners, the inside faces of the glass, and floors right at the end. Loft rooms let as bedrooms are counted in. Bathrooms are not, however many the property has. The two lines that live outside the band are the carpets and the cooker, which goes on at £31 however recently it was cleaned.

Move-out or deep clean

Somebody rings for a deep clean when they want a move-out, or the other way round, and the two are built on opposite logic. A move-out is graded against a document a clerk wrote, so an overrun is our risk and the price is banded before we set off. A deep clean has no document behind it and you decide when it is finished, which makes hours the only fair unit and a team the sensible shape. Where the real problem is a year of standards quietly slipping, the cheaper answer is one team visit to reset the house and a weekly slot afterwards to hold it, and you will hear that even though the weekly slot is the smaller invoice.

Extraction, and the order the hall imposes

£36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, £61 where the front and back rooms are one space, £41 a stair flight, and rugs £35 under 3 sq m or £51 above. Hot water extraction drives heated solution down through the pile and lifts it back out on the same stroke with the soil travelling in it, so the dirt leaves the property instead of being worked further down the tuft. The machine stays in the van. In a Corbett terrace the hose then runs the full length of the hall to reach anything, and there is no gate at the back to shorten the trip, so protection goes down before the first room is touched and the hall carpet is always the last thing cleaned. That order is the whole difference between a tidy morning and a wet trail through your house.

One figure per appliance

£77 a single oven, £110 a double, £143 a 90cm range or a two oven AGA, £23 a hob and £28 an extractor. Shelves, trays, runners, pan supports and the fan cover ride out to the heated tank on the van. Whatever is fixed in place is scraped, gelled and finished by hand, meaning the cavity, the seals and the inside faces of the door glass on any model whose hinges let the panes separate. No caustic product goes near the appliance and none is left behind to burn off, so you can cook on it the same night. An AGA has to be stone cold, which means switching it off the evening before. Self-cleaning liners are hand work and never see the tank.

Hours on the clock, and ironing

£23 an hour per cleaner weekly, £24 fortnightly, and three hours therefore comes to £69 or £72. No contract, and the £67 one off minimum has nothing to do with a standing booking. Three hours is the shortest visit we send anyone out for. Ironing bills at £12 an hour on top of the cleaning time, so the bathroom still gets its hours. In this postcode the bathroom is usually where a visit needs its time, because of the water rather than because of anything you have done.

Adding up a team deep clean

£26 for every cleaner hour on site, one £30 charge for the machines and detergents, and a floor of two people for three hours. Two cleaners across three, four and five hours give £186, £238 and £290. Three cleaners across three, four and six hours give £264, £342 and £498, the last of those being the biggest booking we take and enough to strip a whole house between breakfast and teatime. Have your own vacuum and products out and the £30 drops. Two people for six hours and three people for four both cost £342, so pick on how long you want the house full of cleaners rather than on the money. On a narrow terrace, where the hall is the only route between rooms, the smaller team is often the faster one.

Soft furnishings, a piece at a time

Dining chairs are £13, armchairs £33, mattresses £35 and two seater sofas £57. Curtains go by the drop, £35 for a short one and £42 for a long one, cleaned on the pole so nothing shrinks its way up off the sill. The long drops mostly come off the tall first floor windows in the Edwardian houses around Culverley Green and in the bigger villas up the hill. We work these with a small hand tool rather than the full wand and keep it light, so more water comes back than went in. Past a two seater there is no printed rate at all. The fabric and the shape of the arms are what settle whether the job takes an hour or the rest of the afternoon, so describe yours on the phone and a figure comes back. Leather is hand work only, cleaner then conditioner, and the machine stays outside.

Three Catford facts that decide the slot you get

Hither Green is the useful exception to the first row. Plenty of the interwar semis there have a gate down the side, so a hose reaches the back garden without ever entering the hall.

The roadworks we are planning around

Consent is in place for the A205 to be realigned through Catford and for the Plassy Island one-way system to go, a highway scheme expected to take about two years from 2026. We check the current arrangement the day before a job and quote an arrival window at the booking to match.

The list does not move across the round

Not a penny changes between Hither Green, Bellingham, Rushey Green, Ladywell, Forest Hill and Downham, and the last of those crosses into Bromley. What each place usually books sits on the areas page, every figure including the £67 one off floor is on the prices page, and 020 3129 2846 reaches a person from 8am to 7pm on any day.

Questions we get asked

I am moving out at the end of the month. Which job is that?

The banded move-out clean, set by the bedroom count on your agreement, from £156 up to £425. It is graded against an inventory rather than a clock. Carpets are counted apart from £29 a room at the move-out rate, and the cooker has its own line too, £31 alongside the move-out.

Will you do two jobs in one visit?

Usually, and pairing them up often costs less. Oven parts soak in the tank out at the kerb while the extraction machine works indoors, so the two jobs run side by side rather than one after the other, and the £67 floor is met once across the pair.

Is a Sunday or an evening more expensive?

No. One rate runs 8am to 7pm across all seven days, so a Sunday evening costs what a Wednesday morning costs.

Do you clean sofas, mattresses and curtains?

Yes, and each item has its own figure. Dining chairs £13, armchairs £33, mattresses £35, two seater sofas £57. Curtains are cleaned hanging, £35 on a short drop and £42 on a long one. Anything bigger than a two seater is quoted once you have told us the fabric and the shape of the arms.

What would a whole house of carpet come to?

Counted room by room and flight by flight. On a three bedroom terrace with the loft converted: three bedrooms £108, the hall £22, a through lounge £61, two flights £82 and two landings £18, making £291. We add it up with you on the phone rather than at the front door.