Monster Cleaning Brentford is a small firm working flats and houses across TW8 and the edges around it. Handover cleans and hourly housework fill most weeks, with carpets, ovens, upholstery and team deep cleans in the gaps. Nearly everything sits between Thames Lock at the canal basin and Boston Manor Park at the top of the district, and spreading further has never been the plan. The figures are public: £156 at the bottom of the handover scale and £23 per cleaner an hour on a weekly slot.
What we clean, mostly
A two or three year old flat in a managed block. That is the honest description of an average job here, and it makes Brentford unlike most towns this firm works. The waterfront and canal frontage is near-continuous new build, with Brentford Lock West covering a 6.4 hectare canalside site and Great West Quarter running 763 studio, one and two bedroom flats between Kew Bridge and Brentford stations. Behind that sit the older bones of the town: Victorian and Edwardian terraces off Boston Manor Road and Clifden Road, small cottage rows near the High Street, and interwar semis spreading north towards Osterley. One town, three or four different kinds of morning.
Access, handled for you
Here is the thing we know about Brentford that a firm driving in from elsewhere does not. Getting into a building takes longer than a good deal of the cleaning. The schemes along the Great West Road and the canal run concierge desks, so a crew with a machine wants a booked loading bay slot and a goods lift window, and a few want our insurance on file before the lift will move. The canalside terraces at Brentford Lock are approached from the towpath, so kit is barrowed along the water and two people come instead of one. On a home fixture at the Gtech Community Stadium, roads around Lionel Road and Kew Bridge close, which removes the eastern end of TW8 from the diary for roughly three hours, so the fixture list is checked against a postcode before a slot is agreed.
None of that alters a price. All of it alters which morning we can offer, which is why the booking call asks about the building before it asks about the bedrooms.
Hard water is the local constant
Thames Water supply here is very hard, and the new stock is exactly the wrong stock for it. Combi boilers, thermostatic shower valves, glass screens and integrated dishwashers all scale faster than the appliance warranties seem to assume. A TW8 bathroom therefore eats more of the clock than the identical room would somewhere with soft water, and those extra minutes went into the quoted figure rather than onto the bill afterwards. Scale answers to an acid gel and twenty minutes of patience. It does not answer to effort. It shapes the carpet method too, because rinse water left in a pale pile dries out as a bloom that anyone would take for dirt.
The floor under the carpet is concrete
Nearly all the new stock here is slab with underfloor heating and no ventilated void beneath. In an older house, air moves under the boards and takes moisture away from the back of a carpet without anybody asking it to. On a slab there is nothing under there, so everything dries through the room air, the backing dries last, and damp cannot be aired out from below. We put less water down, take extra dry passes, and bring air movers as standard.
A letting postcode, and what that does to the diary
Plenty of cleaning firms describe every town they cover as though it were wall to wall six month lets. Here that description happens to be accurate. TW8 is one of west London’s most rental-heavy postcodes because so much of the new stock was built to let, with Great West Quarter and the canalside blocks running short professional tenancies and several hundred purpose-built student and co-living rooms on the old GlaxoSmithKline site. Handover work is a genuine staple rather than a sideline. It runs all year instead of piling into one September rush, and Saturdays go first, because that is when the check outs land.
Keys, fobs and holding a cleaner on an address
The rota is built to keep the same person on the same house. People like it, and the visit runs quicker, since nobody is opening three cupboards a week looking for the bin liners. In the managed blocks the concierge usually holds keys and will release ours against a signature, which beats a key safe in a shared lobby, so put us on the visitor list at the start. Fobs hold up more first visits in TW8 than anything else, since some blocks only issue them to a leaseholder in person. An alarm code gets written down once, and it is never read out over a phone. Where somebody is off ill or away, the call comes the evening before with two options: named cover, or shift the visit. Nobody arrives unannounced.
Everything is priced in public
Handover cleans are settled on size before any van is booked, opening at £156 for a studio and topping out at £425 for four bedrooms, with the oven and the floors kept as separate lines. Hourly work costs £23 a cleaner weekly, £24 fortnightly, with ironing at £12 an hour on top. Carpets go by the room from £36, rugs at £35 or £51 by size. Appliances start at £23 for a hob and £28 for an extractor, then £77 for a single oven up to £143 for a two oven AGA. Upholstery is per piece, £13 for a dining chair at the bottom of it. A team deep clean is £26 a cleaner an hour with £30 for the kit, putting two people over three hours at £186 and the ceiling at £498. One off jobs meet a £67 floor; hourly work does not. Not one of those waits behind a phone call. All of them are printed on the prices page, and they hold on the day unless the job grows.
Hours and payment
Seven days a week, 8am to 7pm, on one rate throughout. A Sunday costs what a Tuesday costs, and an evening costs what a morning costs. Payment is by card or bank transfer, with Visa, Mastercard and Amex all taken.
Putting things right
If a clerk writes up something we cleaned on a move out, ring 020 8077 4255 inside 48 hours and somebody returns to put it right. No charge, no form, and far and away the fastest route for everyone concerned. Opening hours sit on the contact page and the small print in our terms.
The round
Isleworth in TW7 and Chiswick in W4, both Hounslow with us. Kew in TW9 over the bridge in Richmond. Osterley beyond the Great West Road, then Hanwell and Ealing north over the canal in W7 and W5. One list of figures. What each area mostly books is on the areas page, and the services page works through the six jobs themselves.