End of Tenancy Cleaning in Mortlake

Queens Road is one of those Mortlake streets where the houses are small enough that you can hear the train pulling into Mortlake station from the back garden. A row of Edwardian mid-terraces, each one about 15 feet wide, with a bay window in the front room, a tiled path from the gate to the front door, and the particular neatness of houses that cost a lot to rent and are looked after accordingly.

Two bedrooms upstairs, a front sitting room, a kitchen-diner at the rear that someone had opened up at some point by taking out the wall between the original kitchen and the dining room, one bathroom, and a small back garden with a patio and a raised bed. The tenants were exactly the couple that Mortlake produces: both worked in the City, moved in before the baby, baby arrived 18 months ago, now moving to a 3-bed in East Sheen because the second bedroom was too small for a cot and a wardrobe at the same time. Two years at £2,100 a month. Managed by Chestertons Sheen.

Parked on Queens Road via RingGo. Zone M, Monday to Saturday, all day. The Sheen Lane crossing was up when we arrived, which was a small mercy — we'd come from a job in Putney and crossed at Sheen Lane without waiting. That doesn't always happen.

The kitchen-diner was the biggest room. A freestanding gas cooker — a Cannon, single oven, four burners. Two years of a household that had transitioned from a cooking-properly couple to a cooking-with-a-baby-on-the-hip couple, which changes the oven pattern: fewer elaborate meals, more one-tray roasts, more things baked at 180 and forgotten about for slightly too long. The oven had a moderate, uneven grease layer — heavier on the bottom where the roasting tray sat, lighter on the sides, with a dark patch on the roof near the fan. First dwell, 20 minutes. The roof needed a targeted second pass. The bottom was standard, one pass. Hob cleaned — two burner caps into the soak tray, enamel wiped. One spill ring from a saucepan of milk that had boiled over and been wiped but not cleaned. Total oven and hob time: 32 minutes.

The rest of the kitchen. Laminate worktops wiped. Sink descaled — the mixer tap had a visible limescale ring at the base after 2 years. Fridge-freezer cleaned. Inside all the cupboards. Under the sink: the usual. The floor — vinyl — mopped. Behind the highchair position: a scattering of dried food at skirting level that told you exactly where a baby had been eating for the last year. Rice, a dried pea, something orange that might have been sweet potato or carrot. Cleaned. The back door to the garden: threshold wiped, a bit of grit from the patio. Kitchen total: 40 minutes.

The front sitting room. This was the room with the features. A bay window with casement panes — not sash, these were Edwardian casements with leaded top lights. The glass cleaned pane by pane, the lead wiped dry. An original fireplace — cast-iron insert with green and cream tiles, a timber mantel, a slate hearth. Each tile wiped. Iron dry-cleaned. Mantel wiped. Hearth vacuumed. The floor was original boards — stripped and lacquered. Mopped with specialist product, barely damp. Picture rail wiped around the room. Carpet in front of the fireplace vacuumed. Radiator done. Skirting wiped. 22 minutes. The period features added about 10 minutes to what a plain room of the same size would take.

Bathroom. Upstairs, a white suite — bath with a shower over and a glass screen, pedestal basin, toilet. The screen had a limescale haze on the lower half. Descaler, dwell time, one pass — light enough that a single application cleared it. Taps descaled. Bath waterline — a light ring. Toilet cleaned. Grout was mostly fine. Floor tiles mopped. 22 minutes.

Two bedrooms. The front bedroom — the couple's room: carpeted, vacuumed, wardrobe wiped inside, window cleaned. The back bedroom — the baby's room: carpet vacuumed, a small milk stain near the door where a bottle had been dropped at 3am and nobody had dealt with it properly at the time. Spot-treated, came out. The windowsill had sticker residue. Just one sticker this time. A single silver star, left behind when the nursery decorations came down. Peeled, adhesive cleaned, paint intact. No army of dinosaurs, no herd of farm animals. Just one quiet star on a Mortlake windowsill. 20 minutes across both bedrooms.

Stairs, landing, hallway. The hallway had a tiled floor — Edwardian geometric tiles in black and terracotta running from the front door to the foot of the stairs. Mopped barely-damp with the right product. The front door — original timber with a stained-glass fanlight above. Door wiped. Stairs vacuumed, bannister wiped. 10 minutes.

The tiled path from the gate to the front door: swept and wiped. This is in scope on some Mortlake tenancies and not others. This one was included. Two minutes.

Total time: 3.5 hours. Two people. A 2-bed Edwardian terrace with period features in every room. The oven took 32 minutes. The bathroom took 22. The sitting room took 22, and 10 of those were the fireplace, the leaded lights, and the picture rail. Without the period features, this house would have been a 2 hour 45 minute job. The features add the time and the features justify the price.

Chestertons' clerk arrived three days later. She covered the Mortlake and East Sheen patch and knew the Edwardian terraces the way you know streets you've walked hundreds of times. She started in the sitting room. Fireplace tiles inspected at close range. Iron checked. Mantel finger-tested. The leaded lights checked — the lead wiped dry, the glass clear. Original floorboards checked — she walked across them in socks. Picture rail finger-tested.

Kitchen: oven opened with her phone torch. The roof checked where the dark patch had been — clean. Hob enamel checked where the milk ring had been — gone. Highchair zone at skirting level: she crouched and looked. Clean. She actually smiled at that. Not because it was remarkable, but because she'd done enough Mortlake checkouts to know that the highchair zone is the last thing tenants think about and the first thing that gets missed.

Bathroom: shower screen angle-tested. Taps checked. Bedrooms: wardrobes opened. The baby's windowsill checked for sticker residue — smooth. Hallway tiles looked at from floor level. The tiled front path: she walked it on the way out and looked back at it.

Fourteen minutes. Everything passed. Her report was 9 pages. All cleaning items passed. The milk stain noted as successfully treated. The original features noted as maintained.

Deposit returned in full via the DPS within 8 days. The family was already unpacking in East Sheen — two streets from Thomson House, a third bedroom for the baby who was now too big for the cot, and a garden where he could eventually learn to walk on grass instead of patio. The silver star stayed behind on the Queens Road windowsill, scraped off and painted over before the next family moved in and stuck their own stars, their own dinosaurs, their own farm animals onto a different windowsill in the same village that everyone discovers by accident and then never quite leaves.