End of Tenancy Cleaning in De Beauvoir Town

Englefield Road is the kind of De Beauvoir street where the trees are taller than the houses and the houses are three storeys of London brick with sash windows and front steps that need sweeping even when nobody uses them. We were doing the first floor of a mid-terrace — up the communal stairs, through the flat's own front door, and into a conversion that had been done well enough that you forgot it was a conversion until you noticed where the kitchen was.

Two bedrooms, a reception room at the front, a kitchen-diner at the rear, a bathroom, and a hallway. The reception had the original sash windows with folding internal shutters. The floors throughout were the original boards, stripped and oiled — not lacquered, oiled, which matters because the wrong product on an oiled floor turns it milky and the right product keeps it dark and even. We checked. We used the right one.

The tenants were a couple who both worked in design — he was at a studio in Shoreditch, she freelanced from the flat. Two years at £2,200 a month. Managed by Dexters Islington.

Parked on Englefield Road via RingGo. Hackney CPZ. Carried the kit up.

The kitchen-diner first. A rear room, about 10 sqm, with a modern refit — handleless units, integrated Bosch oven, ceramic hob, stone worktop. The tenant who freelanced from home had also cooked from home, which meant the oven had more use than a commuter's oven. Moderate grease, even layer, darker around the fan. Single dwell, one pass on the sides, a second pass on the roof. Hob clean — one faint ring from a Le Creuset. Stone worktop wiped. Sink descaled. Inside all the cupboards. The extractor was decent — a proper hood rather than a wall fan — and the surrounding surfaces were clean. Floor — the oiled boards — mopped with the linseed-based product. A drop of olive oil near the hob that had soaked into the wood and darkened slightly. Cleaned as much as possible, the residual darkening documented. Kitchen total: 32 minutes.

The reception room. The best room in the flat. Two sash windows at the front, each with folding internal shutters — the kind with louvred panels that fold back against the wall when open and close across the window for privacy. Painted white, three sections per window, each with an upper and lower panel. That's 12 shutter panels to dust or wipe, plus the hardware — the hinges, the catches, the bolts. Then the sash windows behind them: 4-over-4 each, 32 panes across two windows, each pane cleaned, each glazing bar wiped. Total window-and-shutter time in this room: 22 minutes.

An original fireplace — a slate surround with a cast-iron insert, simpler than the Pimlico marble or the Mortlake Carrara but still original and still needing the right treatment. Iron dry-cleaned. Slate wiped barely-damp. The mantel shelf had a faint ring from a candle that had sat on it for months without a saucer. Wax residue and a heat mark in the slate. Wax scraped carefully, surface cleaned, the heat mark was in the stone. Documented. Cornicing dusted. The oiled boards mopped. 14 minutes for the non-window work.

Bathroom. A modern refit — walk-in shower with a frameless glass panel, wall-hung basin, wall-hung toilet, heated towel rail. The shower glass had light limescale. Single application, one pass. Taps descaled. Toilet light. Floor — stone tiles — mopped. 18 minutes.

Two bedrooms. Front bedroom — the larger one, with another sash window and shutters. Same shutter routine: 6 panels dusted, hardware wiped, then the sash cleaned behind them. The floor — oiled boards — mopped. Built-in wardrobe wiped inside. 16 minutes. Rear bedroom — smaller, a casement window facing the back gardens. No shutters, quicker glass. Carpet in this room rather than boards. Vacuumed. A small ink spot on the carpet near the desk where the freelancer had worked. Blue ink, ballpoint, about the size of a 10p piece. Spot-treated with specialist ink remover. It lightened but didn't fully clear. Documented. 10 minutes.

Hallway: oiled boards mopped. Front door wiped. A row of coat hooks on the wall — the kind that get screwed in by a tenant and leave holes when removed. Two hooks still in place, three holes where hooks had been. The hooks were the tenant's property. The holes were documented. 5 minutes.

Total time: 3.5 hours. Two people. A 2-bed first-floor Victorian conversion with oiled timber floors, shutters on two rooms, and a freelance designer who'd spilled olive oil and ballpoint ink in the same flat. The shutters and sash windows together took 38 minutes across the whole flat. The oiled floors took an extra 5 minutes versus lacquered boards because the product application is slower. These are the De Beauvoir minutes.

Dexters' negotiator arrived two days later. He covered the Islington and De Beauvoir patch and knew the conservation-area terraces well.

Reception: he went to the shutters first. Opened one panel, looked at the louvres. Clean. Closed it. Checked the hardware — the bolt that holds the shutter closed. No dust in the catch. Then the sash behind: spot-checked one pane. Fireplace: the candle-wax location on the slate — he looked at it. The wax was gone, the heat mark remained. He photographed it and wrote 'cosmetic, pre-dates tenancy unclear.' He wasn't sure if it was new or old. That's an honest clerk.

Kitchen: oven opened, torch in. Clean. The olive oil darkening on the boards: he crouched and looked at it. Ran a finger across. He could feel a slight texture difference. Photographed. Noted as 'oil absorption, minor.' Not charged.

Bathroom: shower glass angle-tested. Bedrooms: shutters in the front room checked — same routine, one panel opened. Ink spot in the rear bedroom: he looked at it, compared the colour to the surrounding carpet. Lighter than the original ink but still visible. Photographed. Noted.

The coat-hook holes: he counted them. Three holes, two hooks still in. He photographed the wall with the hooks and the holes together. That would be between the landlord and the tenant.

Eleven minutes. All cleaning items passed. The olive oil, the ink spot, the candle heat mark, and the coat-hook holes were all documented as separate items from the cleaning. None were charged as cleaning failures.

Deposit returned in full within 8 days. The couple moved to a 3-bed house further up Northchurch Road — staying in De Beauvoir, gaining a bedroom, gaining a garden, keeping the canal walk and the towpath cycle to Shoreditch. The shutters on Englefield Road folded closed behind them, and the next tenant would open them the same way and look out at the same trees and wonder how anywhere this quiet could be this close to Dalston.