Two cleaners, seven hours. That is what a proper one-off deep clean of a standard three-bed Victorian terrace costs you in labour, and the number moves either side of it by more than most people expect. A house on Sandringham Road in Hackney took us nine and a half. A near-identical footprint on Cranmer Avenue in Ealing came in at five and a quarter. Same era, same layout, same bay-fronted front room, same awkward half-landing with the window that opens onto next door’s flat roof. The difference was never square footage. It was what had been allowed to build up, and how much original fabric was still in place to work around.
What does a deep clean cover in a house this old?
A deep clean is the version of the job where nothing gets skipped because it is awkward. Tops of doorframes. Behind the cistern. The inside of the extractor hood rather than the front of it. Under the bed, which in a Victorian bedroom usually means shifting a divan that was assembled in the room and has never left it.
The term gets used loosely by every firm in London, mine included, so ask what is on the list before you agree a price. Some outfits sell a deep clean that is a regular clean with the skirtings wiped. Others treat it as everything short of carpet extraction and exterior glass. The gap between those two definitions is roughly eight hours of labour, which on paper looks like a pricing difference and in practice is a different service entirely.
Where the hours disappear in an 1890s build
Modern flats have flat surfaces. That is the whole story. A terrace built in the 1880s or 1890s has picture rails, cornicing, deep moulded skirtings, panelled doors with six recessed fields apiece, sash windows with beading, and a hallway of encaustic tile that has been mopped for a hundred and thirty years and stripped roughly never.
Panelled doors are the quiet killer. Count the cupboards and there are usually eleven or twelve internal doors in a three-bed terrace, and each takes six or seven minutes to do properly against the forty seconds a flush modern door takes. That is an hour of the day gone before anyone has looked at a kitchen. No customer has ever inspected a door and thought about where the time went.
Sashes are worse. A pair of boxed sashes in a bedroom on Pembroke Road in Walthamstow held about a decade of soot in the parting bead and the pulley stiles, and the only way to shift it was a brush, a vacuum crevice tool and patience. Forty minutes for two windows. There are usually seven or eight of them in the house.
So what is the honest hour count for a three-bed terrace?
Think in cleaner-hours rather than clock hours, because that is how the job gets priced and it stops the confusion about whether “six hours” means one person or three.
A house that is occupied, kept tidy and cleaned fortnightly by someone competent will run to somewhere between ten and thirteen cleaner-hours. That is two people for a long day, or three people for a shortish one. A house that has been lived in normally with no deep clean for two or three years lands between fourteen and eighteen. A post-tenancy property, a smoker’s house, a place with two dogs and a cat, or anything handed over at the end of a building job runs from twenty to twenty-eight and occasionally past that. A three-bedroom house is one job on paper and about four different ones by Tuesday afternoon.
Those bands hold across the whole of Greater London and they hold across most of the Victorian stock, whether the house is in Kensal Rise or Nunhead, because the houses were built to the same handful of pattern-book plans by the same speculative builders.
What a six-hour booking buys
Two cleaners for three hours each, which is what a lot of people picture when they ring up, buys the kitchen and one bathroom to a high standard. Or it buys the whole ground floor to a decent one. It does not buy both, and any firm that says it does is planning to skip something and hoping you will not check the inside of the fridge seal.
Here is the opinion that loses me work: fixed-price deep cleans are worse for the customer than hourly rates, and the industry pushes them because they hide the corner-cutting. A fixed price gives the contractor a fee and an incentive to finish early. An hourly rate gives you the right to stand in the hallway at hour five and say the landing skirtings need another pass. Most customers prefer the fixed quote because it feels safer. Most customers are wrong about that.
Which room eats the schedule?
The kitchen. It takes four to six hours of the total on its own, and in a Victorian house it takes longer than the same kitchen would in a 1990s semi, for reasons that have nothing to do with the units.
Ceiling height is the first one. A ground-floor rear kitchen in a terrace off Bramshill Road in Harlesden had 2.9 metres of wall, standard wall units at standard height, and a sixty-centimetre band of dust and airborne grease above them that had never been touched because nobody could see it from the floor. That band takes a steady forty minutes with a step platform and a degreaser that needs dwell time. It is invisible from every position a person occupies in that room, including the one they take when they inspect the work afterwards. Nobody has ever paid for that band of wall with any enthusiasm, on paper or otherwise.
Grease is the second. Cooking film does not sit on a surface, it bonds to it, and the older the film the longer the chemical needs to sit before it will shift. Cleaners who are behind schedule spray and wipe immediately, which removes the top layer and leaves a tacky base coat that will attract dust within a week. The customer sees a clean cupboard door on the day and a grey door in ten days and concludes that the cleaner was no good. The cleaner was rushed.
Then the specifics. Extractor filters need soaking, not scrubbing, and most terrace kitchens have a recirculating hood with a carbon element that should have been replaced two years ago. The gap between the cooker and the base unit holds a decade of debris in a strip forty millimetres wide. Kickboards come off, or they should. Fridge seals need a soft brush and a diluted solution worked into the folds, which takes twelve minutes per appliance and gets skipped almost universally. Splashback grout behind a hob absorbs grease and needs a proprietary cleaner and a stiff nylon brush, and it will not come back to white, only back to a uniform grey.
A galley kitchen in a Victorian rear extension has less floor area than a modern kitchen and more work in it. That is the part people find hard to accept when the quote arrives.
The oven is a separate job
Price it separately, book it separately, and treat it as its own trade. An on-site oven clean on a domestic double runs ninety minutes to three hours depending on carbon build-up, and it involves caustic products that should not be in the air while someone else is cleaning worktops two metres away.
Firms that fold the oven into a general deep clean either rush it or rob the rest of the house of the time. A dip-tank service, where the racks and panels go out to a van, will beat almost anything done in situ. If the oven matters to you, say so at the quoting stage rather than pointing at it on the day.
Does condition change the number more than size does?
Every time. A four-bed on Elms Crescent in Clapham came in under a three-bed in Bromley by two full cleaner-hours, because the Clapham house was minimalist to the point of austerity and the Bromley house had thirty years of family life in it.
Empty houses and occupied houses
An empty property cleans thirty to forty per cent faster. No decanting cupboards. No working around a sleeping shift-worker. No question of whether the paperwork on the desk should be moved, which is a question with no good answer, because moving it risks losing something and not moving it means the desk does not get cleaned.
In an occupied house we clean around possessions rather than through them, and that is a policy rather than laziness. The one exception worth making is the wardrobe floor, which is always worse than the customer thinks and always improves the smell of the room.
When is a deep clean the wrong thing to book?
Often enough that I turn work away most months.
If you are moving out in six weeks, wait. If builders are due, wait, because plaster dust travels through a closed door and will undo the lot in an afternoon. If the problem is one room, book that room and a half-day rather than a whole-house job you do not need.
The bigger one is when the problem is a repair rather than a clean. Perished grout, a failed silicone bead round a bath on Ravensbourne Road, black spotting on a north-facing bedroom wall that is condensation and will return in November whatever anyone sprays on it. Limescale in a pan that has gone past etching does not come back. We will tell you that on the phone and lose the booking, which is the correct outcome.
What to book instead
A fortnightly regular clean for three months will leave a house in better condition than a single deep clean and cost less in total for most three-bed terraces. The deep clean makes sense as a reset before a regular schedule starts, after a tenancy, or after building work. As a standalone annual event it is mostly ceremony.
The tiled hall floor on Sandringham Road came up in the end, after two passes and a neutraliser. Nobody had seen the pattern in years.