People book a deep clean expecting a different service and sometimes expecting a miracle. Here is the honest boundary between the two.
A deep clean is the only job we still price by the hour, and the reason is that no two places need the same one. Before anybody books one, it is worth knowing exactly what we mean by it.
A weekly clean is the surfaces you touch: the kitchen, the bathrooms, the floors, the dust that has landed since last week. It is two or three hours and it keeps a place level.
A deep clean goes behind, under, inside and above. Inside the oven and the fridge, behind the washing machine and the cooker, under the beds and the sofas, the tops of the cupboards and the door frames, the fan blades, the air grilles, the window tracks, the shower grout, the balcony drain. On a two bedroom flat that is six to eight hours with three people. On a house that has not had one for a few years it can be two days.
Here is what it does not do, and this is the part worth reading before you book.
It does not repair anything. Grout that has gone black all the way through is stained rather than dirty, and the honest fix is regrouting, which is a tiler's job and not ours. A shower screen with hard water etched into the glass is the same: the marks are in the surface, not on it.
It does not rescue a mattress that has been wet more than once. We will clean it and we will tell you plainly that it should be replaced, and we would rather say that than take the money twice.
It does not include the ceiling paint, the walls beyond marks that come off, the inside of an air conditioning unit, which needs a technician, or anything that requires taking a fitting apart.
And it does not stay done. A deep clean gives you a level to keep, and keeping it is the weekly visit. Customers who book a deep clean twice a year and nothing in between are paying twice for the same work.
When to book one: before Ramadan, before guests come to stay, once a year in a home that is otherwise cleaned weekly, and always as the first visit in a place we have not worked in before. That last one matters. A three hour first visit in a flat that needs eight leaves everybody disappointed, and it is the most common reason people give up on cleaners altogether.
