Window Cleaning in Lenton

Window Cleaning for Lenton homes

Terraced student houses where the interior glass has a film of cooking residue and condensation. It costs real daylight in a house that already faces another terrace ten metres away.

Derby Road is a heavy traffic route and the glass on the houses facing it shows it, with a fine grit and exhaust film that returns within a month. The front elevation there wants a four weekly rota while the back and the quieter streets behind are comfortable at six to eight weeks. Most of these terraces run to three storeys with a loft dormer at the rear, which sits at the upper end of what a pole reaches and has to be approached from the right side of the property. Interiors are almost never booked by tenants and quite often by landlords at changeover, which is the sensible moment: it is the one fortnight in the year when the house is empty and somebody with a key is certain to be there.

Lenton sits in NG7, under Nottingham City Council. The housing here is mostly almost entirely Victorian and Edwardian terraces converted to shared houses, plus purpose-built student blocks along Derby Road, and that is what shapes this job more than the floor area does.

What we run into on Lenton window cleaning jobs

Replacement uPVC in these houses tends to be whatever was cheapest at the time, and the drainage slots along the bottom of the outer frame block quickly with road grit. Once they are blocked, rain sits inside the frame and eventually finds its way through, which gets reported as a leaking window when it is a blocked hole and two minutes with a wire and a brush. We clear them as part of the round. The rear dormer is the other detail: the reach is longer than it looks from the pavement, because the pole has to clear the roof of the back extension before it gets anywhere near the glass.

How a Lenton window cleaning job actually runs

A terraced round is worked as a row rather than as single addresses, which is why a date here is a morning on the street rather than an appointment at an hour. Fronts are done from the pavement, and the practical obstacle is cars parked half on it, because a pole has to stand back from the glass to reach a third storey and a van roof under the window decides the angle. Backs are the harder half. Access is through a shared entry between two houses, and those gates get bolted from the yard side, or the bins are stacked in the entry, or the only route is through the house and somebody has to be in. Where none of that works, the rear elevation is booked separately for a day it can be reached. The van carries a finite tank of purified water, so how many houses get done before a refill is a genuine planning number. Autumn is the busiest stretch, once leaf debris and the first wet weather have put a film on everything facing the road.

Who books it here

The local reference points are University Park, the QMC and Derby Road, which is usually enough for us to find a property without a postcode lookup.

We run Lenton on the same round as Radford, The Park Estate and Beeston.

What we check on every Lenton job

The glass is the quick part. What gets looked at is the ironmongery and the edges. The friction stays on the openers, which pack with grit and then bind. The rubber gasket where it has shrunk back from a corner. The restrictor arms. The leading edge of an opening light, where the seal collects black dirt nobody sees with the window shut. Sills get the outer edge and the drip groove under the front lip rather than only the top face. Moss on a stone sill and algae on a north facing frame come off with the brush instead of being left to root further in. The fanlight above a front door and the letterplate flap are both on the list, and so is the obscure glass in the bathroom, which shows smearing far more readily than clear glass does. Condensation sitting between two panes is reported as a failed unit rather than cleaned, because nothing reaches it.

What the window cleaning covers

A sample of what is included

• Interior: Glass washed, squeegeed in a single continuous pass and buffed dry
• Interior: Frame, sill and track dusted and vacuumed first, so you are not making mud
• Exterior: Drainage holes at the bottom of the frame cleared, which otherwise block and let water pool inside
• Exterior: No ladders, so no access needed through the house in most cases

That is a sample rather than the whole list. The full window cleaning page sets out every section of the scope, what is deliberately excluded and why, how long it takes on each property size, and what tends to go wrong.