Deep cleaning in Milton Keynes, Stony Stratford to Newton Leys

Descaling is the bulk of a Milton Keynes deep clean. It is not only the crust on the taps. It is the cloudy film across the shower screen, the blocked holes in the shower head, the grout going grey, the seal and the filter in the washing machine, the element in the kettle and the spray arms in the dishwasher, none of which a weekly clean ever touches. We descale rather than scour, because taking hard water deposits off chrome and glass with an abrasive takes the finish with it. Where glass has been left long enough to etch, cleaning will not bring it back, and we say so on the day rather than let you find out afterwards.

Then the fabric of the Development Corporation estates. Netherfield was built with timber frames and party walls bolted to a concrete slab. Bean Hill was Foster Associates, timber framed with aluminium cladding. Coffee Hall went up in concrete walls under flat roofs. Leaking roofs, condensation and poor sound insulation were complaints from the beginning rather than things that arrived later. In an occupied house that shows as black spotting in a bedroom corner, on window reveals, behind a wardrobe on an outside wall and in the sealant round the bath. We clean it back as part of the job, and where the cause is a cold surface and too little ventilation we say so, because a clean will not stop it returning. On the Netherfield houses that have had the retrofit, the new ventilation is the thing worth keeping clear.

Wolverton and New Bradwell ask for the other kind of care. The railway company laid New Bradwell out from the mid 1850s for the works half a mile away, and the last of its terraces on Spencer Street were saved by a preservation order in 1975 when the rest came down. Wolverton became a conservation area in December 2001, with an Article 4(2) direction from July 2003 covering windows, doors, door surrounds, terracotta mouldings, roof coverings and chimneys. Nobody is swapping that joinery for something easier to wipe, so it gets washed by hand and dried rather than left wet, and there is far more moulding per room than the floor area suggests, most of it above eye level. Out at Brooklands, Oakgrove, Whitehouse, Fairfields and Newton Leys the same hours go somewhere else entirely: the trickle vents in the window frames, the extract grille in the bathroom and the filter over the hob.

Access is its own job in Central Milton Keynes. Aubrey Place on Avebury Boulevard runs to 19 storeys and 294 flats over an undercroft car park holding 49 vehicles, with cycle stores for 294 bikes, which tells you what parking is like in the newer blocks. A deep clean in one of those starts with a loading bay, a fob and a lift rather than a van outside the door, so we want to know beforehand whether there is a concierge and how the lift is booked, and we plan one trip up with the equipment instead of five.

Two other local things worth settling early. Milton Keynes City Council delivers recycling sacks once a year on a set allowance per household and charges for bulky collections, which are priced by what is on the list and have to be booked first, so we agree before the day what is going out and what is staying. And the Parks Trust looks after more than 6,000 acres of green space here, 80 miles of it along the grid roads, with over 200 miles of Redway running through it, which is why a house with a back gate onto a linear park takes the worst of it on the hall, the stairs and the back door from October onwards.