Monster Cleaning Lewisham is a small outfit working on flats and houses through SE13 and SE8, with New Cross, Greenwich, Blackheath and Brockley round the edges of it. The diary is mostly check-out cleans and hourly housework; carpets, cookers, upholstery and the odd team deep clean fill in around them. None of the pricing waits for a phone call. The move-out band opens at £156, housework runs £22 a cleaner hour on a weekly slot, and mileage has never appeared on an invoice.
Where the round actually goes
SE13 and SE8 at the middle, both inside the London Borough of Lewisham. SE14 and SE4 west, SE3 east, SE10 over the boundary in the Royal Borough of Greenwich. That is the lot, and it is not the whole of south east London. Claiming otherwise would be pointless, since anybody based in Catford or Sydenham covers those streets better than a van setting off from the town centre.
Three kinds of home within half a mile
Anyone used to a uniform round finds Lewisham awkward. The town centre is flats now. Loampit Vale, Molesworth Street and the Gateway scheme have put thousands of them into tall blocks across about fifteen years, standing alongside 1960s and 1970s council blocks on the high street. Walk a few streets out and it reverts to Victorian and Edwardian terrace, very often carved into a ground floor flat holding the garden and an upper maisonette with its own stair. Climb towards Blackheath or Brockley and a thinner layer of larger three storey houses appears. The same two bedroom job in the first of those and in the last can be an afternoon apart, at an identical price.
The two front doors, and why we ask about them
This is the most useful thing to know about the patch and the thing most firms discover on the morning. Where a house has been divided, the halves frequently have separate front doors and nothing joining them inside, so the upstairs flat has no internal route to the back of the building at all. No garden, no bins, no outside tap. For a mop it hardly registers. For a carpet machine, which works off a filled tank and needs somewhere to empty, it shapes the entire job, and for a weekly cleaner it decides whether the bins go out. So the question gets asked at the booking, and where the answer is the upper flat, the water and the access are squared with the neighbour beforehand.
Access is the trade skill here
Almost everything difficult on this round reduces to getting a person and a machine to a front door. Blocks around Loampit Vale sign visitors in, run a loading bay with a clock on it and hold the service lift for whoever books it, which is twenty minutes at the start and twenty at the finish, so a two hour slot arranged without that allowance overruns. We reserve the lift alongside the clean. The villa conversions on the higher roads offer one shared door, an internal stair and no lift, so kit travels up in stages and the communal hall belongs to the freeholder rather than to any tenancy. At the booking stage, knowing which of the three you live in is worth more to us than your postcode.
The water
Thames Water supplies SE13 hard, which makes a bathroom here eat more of a visit than the same bathroom would in a soft water town. Screens go milky from the tray up. A crust forms where the tap meets the basin. Kettles fur inside a fortnight, and the rainfall heads in the newer flats scale internally where nobody can see it. You are looking at a mineral fused to the surface, not dirt sitting on top, so the fix is an acid descaler and the discipline to walk away while it works. Those minutes get costed in from the opening call. Once the glass underneath has gone etched, which a few tenancies usually manage, no amount of extra time helps. Better said early than argued about later.
September, and why we ask for notice
This borough rents heavily. Goldsmiths students spill out of New Cross, hospital staff move between flats near the town centre, and Canary Wharf commuters take the new build-to-rent flats off the DLR. Nearly all of it runs on twelve month agreements, so the year turns over in one lump rather than trickling through. From mid August to the end of September the diary runs a week or more ahead and work does get turned away, which we enjoy no more than you would. Ring as soon as a date is fixed. In February the answer is usually tomorrow.
One cleaner, one address
Each home gets a single cleaner and keeps her while the rota allows it. Households like the arrangement and it is faster, since by the third visit nobody is rummaging through cupboards after the vacuum. Keys sit with us or in a safe beside the door for most regulars, and a concierge holds one in the newer blocks. Every key is numbered and none carries an address. An alarm code is taken once, at the start, and never repeated down a phone line. Then there are the weeks when somebody is ill or away: you get a call the evening before, naming a replacement or offering another day, and dropping the week costs nothing. Nobody ever turns up unannounced. Want somebody different? Say so and it happens, no reasons required.
Every job has a printed number
Kitchen appliances are the shortest list of the lot. Hob £23, extractor £28, single oven £77, double £110, 90cm range £114, two oven AGA £143. Floors: £36 a room, £43 a living room, £61 a through lounge, £41 for a flight, rugs at £35 or £51 depending on size. Soft furnishings begin with a £13 dining chair and top out at £57 for a two seater, while curtains follow the drop at £35 or £42. Housework bills £22 a cleaner hour weekly, £24 fortnightly, ironing £12 out of those same hours. Team deep cleans charge £26 a cleaner hour and £30 of kit a single time, which makes two people over three hours £186 and the largest booking taken is £498. Move-outs ignore all that arithmetic and band on bedrooms, £156 through £425, agreed before a date is written down. A £67 floor sits beneath one off work; hourly work has none. Every line is printed on the prices page.
One rate, seven days
Somebody is out working between 8am and 8pm on all seven days and none of those hours has ever carried a premium. A Sunday costs a Tuesday’s money, bank holidays included. You settle at the end, by card or transfer or cash, with nothing taken in advance on domestic work and no VAT appearing afterwards. Machines and materials travel with the cleaner, so there is nothing to buy in beforehand.
What cannot be cleaned out
Certain marks are permanent, and flagging them early costs everybody less than a row afterwards. Scorching burned into a worktop. Dye out of a rug backing that has run into the carpet beneath. Bleach spotting, where the fibre has no colour left for anything to work on. Pet damage that went through the underlay and into the boards. A shower screen etched beneath scale that has since been removed. All of them get a genuine attempt, and the verdict reaches you in the room rather than by text afterwards. Deposits sit in the same category. An agent and a clerk settle those between them, and deductions arrive for arrears and broken fittings quite as easily as for dirt.
The flat refusals run shorter. A two-step ladder is as high as anybody goes, which rules out gutters, roofs and glass off the ground. Gardens, lofts and garages are out. So are shared halls, stairwells and bin rooms. Waste past a bag or two needs a licensed carrier. And no site gets started on while the trades are still in it. And nothing to do with damp beyond cleaning its surface, since proofing, tanking, ventilation work, drying out and mould rooted below the surface belong to other trades entirely, which is stated rather than sold around.
When something is missed
One call to 020 8077 4931 inside 48 hours and the item gets done again at no cost. Nothing to fill in, and nobody debating fault. Where the complaint came off a check-out report, that call is far and away the fastest route, since a return visit takes an hour and a deposit dispute takes weeks. The contact page carries the opening hours and the services page gives each job a section of its own.
Questions we get asked
How far from Lewisham do you go?
SE13 and SE8 are the middle, with New Cross in SE14, Brockley in SE4, Blackheath in SE3, Greenwich in SE10 and Ladywell back inside SE13 around them. Nothing is added for mileage inside it, and a little beyond the edge is still worth ringing about.
Are the prices genuinely fixed?
The move-out band is fixed. Agree a bedroom count and the figure holds, short of the property proving materially unlike what was described. Everything else is a published rate per room, per appliance or per cleaner hour, which leaves nothing to invent on a doorstep.
Why do you ask which front door I have?
Because so many terraces here are split into two flats with separate doors and nothing joining them inside, leaving the upper flat with no way to the garden, the bins or the outside tap. That decides where a hose runs and where a bucket gets filled.
Something has been missed. What happens next?
Call within 48 hours and the item is cleaned again at no charge. If a clerk wrote it up, send the report through rather than a summary of it, because agents relay these loosely and what gets described on the phone is often not what the page says.