Hawthorn, Kew & Camberwell
Post-renovation cleaning in Hawthorn, Kew and Camberwell
Melbourne’s inner east is period-home territory: Victorian and Edwardian houses with pressed ceilings, deep cornices, ceiling roses, timber fretwork, leadlight and original floorboards, extended at the back with a new kitchen and a lot of glass. The two halves of the house need completely different handling.
What period homes demand
Plaster dust settles in ornamental work
Cornices, ceiling roses and pressed metal are dust traps with a hundred edges. They cannot be wiped and they cannot be soaked. It is slow, careful work and it is the difference between a house that looks renovated and one that looks like a building site with new appliances.
Original surfaces will not tolerate the standard approach
Old floorboards, leadlight, original tiles, cast-iron and unsealed timber all react badly to the products and pressure that are fine on new surfaces. Where we are not confident a finish will take it, we stop and ask rather than test it on your house.
Old and new meet in the middle
The rear extension is all glass, stone and new joinery: film, stickers, grout haze, adhesive. The front of the house is original. The same clean has to do both properly, and pricing it as a single rate per square metre gets it wrong in both directions.
Dust travels the whole house
These houses have long central hallways and high ceilings, and renovation dust moves down them into every room including the ones that were never touched. Cleaning only the extension leaves the source of the next layer sitting in the hall.
Tell us about the original features
When you send photos, include the parts of the house that were not renovated: the cornices, the leadlight, the floorboards, the fireplace. They are usually the parts we need to allow the most time for, and they are almost never in the photos people send.