Estate and multi-room upholstery cleaning

The rooms nobody sits in

This is the argument worth making first, because it runs against intuition.

A formal living room gets used twice a year. The reasonable conclusion is that its furniture stays clean. Dust does not require anybody to sit down. It settles continuously, it works into the weave, and in a bright room the sun bakes it in.

So after fifteen years a formal sofa is genuinely dirty, and because the change happened so slowly and nobody was looking, it is invisible until it is cleaned. These pieces also clean quickly and cheaply, because there is no body oil to speak of, which makes them the best value on the whole property.

How a large property is usually priced

All figures after the 15%.

Those are illustrations rather than packages. You tell us what is actually in the house and we total it on the call.

Why there is no bulk rate

The 15% applies to every piece regardless of how many there are, and there is no additional volume discount. Worth explaining rather than leaving you to wonder.

Each piece is a complete job. Its own fabric to identify, its own concealed test where there is no label, its own pre-treatment matched to what is actually in it. Twelve pieces is twelve of those, not one job with eleven cheap additions.

What you genuinely save by doing it together is our travel and setup, and that is already reflected in the fact that the rate does not climb for a large property in an expensive postcode.

The casita is usually the worst piece on the property

Consistently, and for a reason that makes sense once you hear it.

Guest accommodation gets used a handful of times a year, so nobody is watching it. There is no gradual decline that anybody notices, no moment where somebody says the sofa is looking tired. In plenty of properties it has not been cleaned since the house was furnished.

It is also frequently in a building that gets closed up between visits, which means still air and settled dust rather than circulation.

When you ring, tell us what is in the outbuildings as well as the main house. Same rate, same visit.

For managed properties

• Access and timing arranged directly with your manager or caretaker
• Invoice wherever you want it, management company or owner
• Receipt by email or text, which matters when somebody keeps records for an absent owner
• A written note of which pieces were done and the condition of each
• Anything we did not clean, and why, stated in that note rather than left out

That last point matters most when an owner is not present to judge it. If we decline a piece, or find one that did not need doing, the manager gets told rather than billed.

Splitting it across visits

Perfectly workable and it suits some households better, particularly where the house has people in it much of the year.

The only thing to know is that the $150 minimum applies to each visit, so very small sessions are inefficient. Two visits of five or six pieces each works fine. Six visits of one piece does not.

Questions