End of Tenancy Cleaning in Millwall

The concierge at Millharbour knew we were coming because we'd been there twice already that month. Different flats, different tenants, same building, same process. He waved us through and had the goods lift held. That's how it works on the dock-side developments — you build a relationship with the building, not just the tenant.

Fifteenth floor. Two bedrooms, an open-plan kitchen-living room overlooking Millwall Inner Dock, two bathrooms, a balcony, a hallway. The tenant was a derivatives trader who'd been there 14 months on a furnished corporate let at £2,800 a month. He'd already moved to Singapore. The keys were with Life Residential's Canary Wharf office.

Collected the keys at 9am. Underground parking confirmed. Goods lift booked. Up to 15 with the full kit.

The glass first. The living room had a continuous run of floor-to-ceiling glass facing west across the dock — about 6 metres. Millwall Inner Dock is still water, and in the morning light every mark on the glass showed as a double image, the real mark and its reflection in the dock surface below. Professional glass cleaner, vertical strips, squeegee finish. The balcony door and glass done the same way. Both bedrooms had full-height windows facing south toward the Thames. Total glass across the flat: 30 minutes.

The kitchen occupied one wall of the open-plan space. Integrated Bosch throughout — oven behind a handleless push-to-open door, induction hob set into a white quartz worktop. The tenant had been a takeaway-and-microwave person during the week and a proper cook on Sundays. The oven reflected this — moderate grease from weekly use, nothing heavy. Single dwell, 18 minutes, one pass. The induction hob was clean apart from two faint marks where pans had been dragged rather than lifted. Specialist ceramic product, gone. Quartz worktops wiped with the right cleaner. Integrated fridge-freezer: the fridge was nearly empty and clean. The freezer had a thin ice layer. Dishwasher interior wiped, filter checked. Extractor filter soaked.

The furniture added time throughout. A large corner sofa: vacuumed with the brush attachment, under the cushions cleared out. A dining table and four chairs: wiped. A glass coffee table: cleaned both surfaces. In each bedroom: bed frame wiped, underneath vacuumed, mattress surface vacuumed, bedside tables wiped. The second bedroom had been used as an office — a desk with a monitor stand and a set of headphones the tenant had left behind. Wiped and noted for collection via the agent. Engineered oak flooring throughout: mopped with specialist product.

Two bathrooms. The en-suite had a walk-in shower with a frameless glass panel, wall-hung basin, wall-hung toilet, heated towel rail. The glass was lightly scaled. Single descaler application, 10-minute dwell, one pass. Chrome polished dry. 18 minutes. The main bathroom had a shower cubicle with a sliding door, basin on a vanity, toilet. The sliding door track needed descaling — cloth squeezed into the channel, dwell time, pulled through. 16 minutes.

Hallway: engineered floor mopped. Front door wiped. Entry-phone panel wiped. A coat cupboard: empty except for a single umbrella and a gym card. 5 minutes.

Total time: 3.5 hours. Two people. A furnished 2-bed tower apartment with 6 metres of dock-facing glass, integrated Bosch appliances, and the cooking pattern of someone who worked 14-hour days five days a week and roasted a chicken on Sundays. The furniture added about 30 minutes. The glass took 30 minutes. The oven was one of the lighter ones that month.

Life Residential's negotiator came the following morning. She had a tablet with the check-in photographs and the same efficient approach we'd seen from every Canary Wharf agent doing a dock-side checkout. Living room glass: she stood at two points and checked against the light reflecting off the dock. Clear. Kitchen: oven opened with her phone torch, induction hob angle-checked, quartz finger-tested. Furniture: she checked the sofa arms, looked under the coffee table, opened the desk drawer in the second bedroom. The headphones were noted for the tenant to collect.

Bathrooms: shower glass angle-tested in both, sliding door track checked. Floors: she walked the flat in socks. She lifted a corner of the living room rug and checked the floor beneath. Clean.

All items passed. Report uploaded to their system within the hour. Deposit returned in full within 7 days. The trader received the confirmation in his new apartment in Marina Bay and forwarded it to someone at the bank's relocation department, and that was Millwall done.

Three minutes' walk from Millharbour, on Manchester Road, someone else was moving out of a Victorian terraced house with a gas oven and a back garden and a completely different checkout process. We'd clean that one too, later in the week, with different products and a different approach but the same standard. That's the Isle of Dogs — two entirely different versions of E14 sitting right next to each other, separated by a dock and about fifty years of architectural history.