Deep cleaning in Bedford, MK40 to MK44

Bedford is supplied by Anglian Water and the central postcodes measure around 260 milligrams per litre of calcium carbonate, which sits in the hard band. That figure turns into work in one particular way: scale builds up where a weekly clean has no reason to go. The rubber seal under a shower screen, the jets in a shower head, under the pan rim, the base of a mixer tap, the fold in a washing machine door seal. Working those back to bare surface is most of a bathroom day here, and it is the part people notice when they get home.

The big Victorian houses run north of the centre along Kimbolton Road and Bushmead Avenue, inside the conservation area, which the borough's character appraisal divides into named sub areas including Rothsay and Russell Park. Three storeys and often a cellar means a deep clean here is measured in flights of stairs. The ceiling rose, the cornice, the picture rail and the tops of tall doors all sit above head height and none of it is reachable from the floor. Lime plaster and original joinery mark if you go at them hard, so those rooms take steps, time and the mildest thing in the van rather than the strongest. Plenty of these houses are flats now, in which case the job is one floor of a building and the communal stairs belong to somebody else.

North of the river it inverts. Bedford Borough Council bought Brickhill Farm in 1954 and the first house on the estate was occupied in 1959, with Putnoe built out on the same pattern behind it, so what we walk into there is often sixty odd years of one family in one house: carpet through the whole ground floor, and a textured ceiling in a great many of them. We dust a textured ceiling and stop there. A coating put up before 2000 can contain asbestos, and disturbing one is specialist work rather than cleaning. At the other end of the age range, Wixams and Great Denham are still filling up, and the deep cleans we do on those plots are usually about construction dust rather than grime. It keeps arriving long after the builders have gone, out of loft hatches, trickle vents and the gap behind a new skirting, and it settles on everything at once.

Timing has a local shape too. Spring clean enquiries start in January and the good weeks in March and April go early, which is true anywhere. What is particular to Bedford is how much independent schooling sits inside the town: the Harpur Trust runs Bedford School on De Parys Avenue, Bedford Modern on Manton Lane and Bedford Girls' School on Cardington Road, and their holidays are longer than the borough's. If your house is going to be empty for a stretch of one, say so when you book. An empty house is a quicker deep clean than an occupied one, and those weeks fill up first.