End of Tenancy Cleaning in Barnehurst

Beechcroft Avenue is the B in the ABC roads, and it looks like what the B in the ABC roads should look like — a curved street of 1930s semis, each one a mirror of the one next door, bay windows along both sides like a hall of mirrors stretching toward Bursted Wood at the far end. The driveways alternate between paved and block-paved depending on when each owner got around to doing it. The hedges alternate between trimmed and untrimmed depending on the same thing. It's the kind of street where you can walk from one end to the other and the only thing that changes is the house number.

Three bedrooms, a front lounge, a rear dining room, a kitchen, a family bathroom, a lean-to conservatory off the dining room, and front and back gardens. The family had been there 2 years — two parents, two children aged 9 and 6. He caught the train from Barnehurst to Cannon Street every morning. She drove to a school in Welling where she worked as a teaching assistant. £1,800 a month. Managed by Robinson Jackson from their Barnehurst office on Erith Road.

Parked on the driveway. No restrictions. The street was quiet at 9am — everyone who was going to work had already gone.

Kitchen first. The original compact layout, about 7 sqm, unchanged since the last refit in the 2000s. A freestanding gas cooker — a Hotpoint, single oven, four burners. Two years of a family that cooked most evenings and used the oven for everything from chicken to fish pie to whatever the 9-year-old had requested from a YouTube cooking video. The oven was moderate to heavy. The roof was dark. Double dwell on the cavity. Second pass on the roof. Single pass on the sides and bottom. Hob cleaned, burner caps soaked.

Worktops — laminate — wiped. Sink descaled — the tap had a thick white collar. Double application. Fridge-freezer cleaned. Inside all the cupboards. Under the sink: two carrier bags, a bottle of Flash, and a marble. A single marble, clear glass with a blue swirl inside it. Floor — vinyl — mopped. Behind the cooker: pulled out, wall degreased. A pen lid and a hair band. Kitchen total: 30 minutes.

Conservatory. About 8 sqm, lean-to UPVC off the dining room. This was the homework-and-TV zone — a sofa, a low table, and the general atmosphere of a room that two children had used every evening for 2 years. The glass had fingerprints on every pane at child height and condensation marks on the lower sections from being the room that got cold first when the heating went off. Six panes of interior glass cleaned. Floor — vinyl — mopped. Door track to the garden: leaves, grit, a small piece of gravel that had been kicked in. Track vacuumed and wiped. One pane had a small scratch at about 70cm — the height of a ruler being waved around by a 6-year-old. Documented. 14 minutes.

Dining room. Carpeted, vacuumed. A casement window — UPVC, quick. 6 minutes.

Front lounge. Carpeted, vacuumed. Bay window — UPVC, cleaned. Gas fire in a modern surround — wiped. Radiator done. 10 minutes.

Bathroom. A white suite — bath with a thermostatic shower over and a glass screen, pedestal basin, close-coupled toilet. Two years of Bexley hard water and a family of four. The shower screen had moderate limescale on the lower half. Double descaler, two passes. Taps — solid white crusts at the bases. Bath waterline — moderate ring, standard treatment. Toilet — calcium below the waterline. Standard soak, manual scrubbing. Grout mostly clean. Floor — vinyl — mopped. 24 minutes.

Three bedrooms. Master: carpeted, vacuumed, bay window at the front — UPVC, cleaned. Wardrobe — fitted sliding doors — wiped inside. 10 minutes. Second bedroom: carpeted, vacuumed, UPVC window, wardrobe wiped inside. 8 minutes. Children's room: shared by the 9-year-old and the 6-year-old. Carpet vacuumed — a small stain near the wardrobe, spot-treated, lightened. UPVC window cleaned. The wardrobe doors had a height chart drawn directly onto the inside of the left door in pencil. Five marks, each with a date and a name, the lowest about 90cm and the highest about 130cm. The chart was inside the wardrobe, on the door, in pencil. We didn't clean it off. It was inside a wardrobe and the agent would need to open the door and look at the inside surface to see it. We made a note and moved on. If the landlord wanted it gone, that was between the landlord and the deposit. 10 minutes.

Stairs and hallway: carpeted, vacuumed. Front door wiped. 6 minutes.

Total time: 3.5 hours. Two people. A 3-bed 1930s semi on the B road with a conservatory, a gas oven, hard water, a marble under the sink, a ruler scratch on the conservatory glass, and a pencil height chart on the inside of a wardrobe door. The kind of house where you can see the family in every room — the YouTube recipes in the oven, the homework in the conservatory, the height chart in the wardrobe. Barnehurst is full of families like this. The houses are all the same. The families are all different.

Robinson Jackson's negotiator arrived two days later. He walked from the Barnehurst office on Erith Road — about an 8-minute walk along the ABC roads, which he'd done hundreds of times for hundreds of checkouts on houses that all looked like this one.

Kitchen: oven opened, phone torch in. Roof checked. Clean. Tap base: touched. Smooth. Behind the cooker: he crouched and looked. Clean. The marble was on the counter. He picked it up, held it to the light — the blue swirl caught the kitchen window — and put it back down.

Bathroom: shower screen — he looked at it from an angle. Clean. Taps touched. Smooth. Toilet crouched. Clean.

Conservatory: the ruler scratch on the glass at 70cm. He looked at it. Photographed. He'd seen a lot of conservatory scratches in the ABC roads because every family on every road has children and every child does something to the conservatory glass at some point. He noted it as cosmetic.

Children's room: he opened the wardrobe. He saw the height chart. Five pencil marks, five dates, two names. He looked at it for a moment longer than the other items. Then he photographed it and wrote something on his tablet. He didn't say anything about it.

Ten minutes. Everything passed on the cleaning. The ruler scratch and the height chart were noted separately. The marble was noted as tenant property.

Deposit returned in full within 8 days. The family moved to a 4-bed extended semi further along the alphabet — Doris Avenue or Doidge Avenue, one of the D roads, still Barnehurst, still DA7, still an 8-minute walk from the station. The marble went with them. The height chart stayed behind on the inside of the wardrobe door, and whoever moved in next would open that door and find two children's names and five dates in pencil, measuring the distance between the floor and the top of their heads at intervals that mattered enough to mark but not enough to measure anywhere more permanent than the inside of a wardrobe that was about to belong to someone else.