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Curtains And Moving Out Cleaning

Fabric Curtain Providing Shade in Sunny Wimbledon

Some things that need to be done as part of moving out cleaning are obvious. It goes without saying that you will have to scrub the loo, get the dust on the windowsill and take a rubber to the pencil “artwork” you discovered on your five-year-old’s bedroom wall behind the door. However, there are other areas where you might not be sure about whether or not you need to clean them or not. Take the curtains – these are often a bit of a tricky area.

What Do You Do With The Curtains?

Well, if you’re talking about a house you own, it’s up to you what you do with the curtains when you move out. You can opt to clean them and hang them back up, you can just leave them as is and let the new owner decide what to do with them (they could very easily decide that they want to change the curtains), or you can take them down and take them with you. In the case of the latter, then it’s a nice idea to put fresh ones up, although not all home sellers do this.

However, what about when you move out of a rental property? Unless you bought and hung your own curtains up in place of the landlord’s curtains when you moved in, those curtains are part of the house, and they need to be as clean as when you moved in. This means that you may need to ensure that they are properly cleaned to keep the landlord happy and get your deposit money back.

White Transparent Curtain Waving

The simplest thing to do with the curtains is just ask the landlord what he or she would like done! In some cases, the landlord may have been planning to update the curtains, especially if they’re getting a bit old, worn and faded, or if he/she has just updated the curtains in their own house and had planned to move the old ones to the rental. In other cases, the landlord might say not to bother unless they’re really bad, and in other cases, he or she might ask you to clean them. If you know the curtains are in really bad condition (your toddler scribbled on them with a permanent marker, the cat clawed them or they blew into a candle flame and got singed), then you can tell the landlord that the curtains are bad and offer to replace them yourself (ask about preferred colour). Or just go ahead and replace them anyway, picking something with a colour as close to the original as you can. This can often prove cheaper than losing your deposit money because of curtains in bad condition.

Incidentally, if the curtains are merely getting old and the discolouration on them is caused by hanging in strong sunlight for a long time, then this comes under the heading of ordinary wear and tear. If you are moving out of a rental property after being in there for years, the curtains aren’t going to look quite as spiffy as they did when you first moved in. Time and UV rays will do that to fabric, especially reds, pinks and purples, which seem to fade very easily. The landlord cannot penalise you or hold back your deposit money if the curtains are faded by sunshine, as there is nothing that you did to cause the curtains to look that way, and it’s not a cleaning issue.

However, if the curtains are dirty rather than damaged, then you might like to try cleaning them yourself. You could take them down to a dry-cleaning agent, but it is sometimes possible to clean the curtains yourself… although this does have a few risks, and you have to know what you’re doing. Getting a professional moving out company to help or even a professional upholstery cleaner might be the safest option.

How To Clean A Curtain

If the only problem with the curtains is a bit of dust and a few cobwebs (those spiders go everywhere, don’t they?), then you can actually do quite a lot of cleaning with the vacuum cleaner, assuming that you’ve got a model that has a hose and canister, and a set of heads that can be changed. Use the upholstery head on the hose and sweep down both sides of the curtain to get the dust off. This is a two-person job, as you will need one person to hold the curtain steady so it doesn’t go up the vacuum, and one person to operate the vacuum cleaner.

Clean Curtain On a Window

If you are lucky, this will leave the curtains looking pretty good, and it may be all you need to do to keep the landlord happy. All the same, if the curtains still look a bit grubby and have things on them that won’t come off with the vacuum cleaner, then you may need to up the ante a bit and actually wash the curtains. I remember one set of dining room curtains in my place that had a smudge of tomato sauce on them…

To wash the curtains, you will need to take them down from the railings. Your next step will be to check them for colourfastness by getting a teeny bit of the hem damp and seeing if the colour bleeds (test this by putting a pale-coloured rag underneath). If you’re really lucky, the curtains will have a care label on them telling you how to wash them – mine do, anyway! Follow these instructions.

However, if your curtains don’t have a care label, this is more or less how it’s done:

  1. Remove all hooks and similar metal bits and trims. If your curtains are pencil pleat curtains, loosen them off so the pleats open out.
  2. Pop them in the bathtub (if you have one) or the largest sink in the house. You will need to wash curtains by hand, not in the machine. Start by running warm water into the sink or bath and adding some mild detergent. Wool wash products, melted soap gel, or shampoo will work (but don’t use a 2-in-1 shampoo–conditioner blend) will do the job. You may still want to put on rubber gloves. Don’t use bleach.
  3. ·Swish the curtains around in their warm soapy bath until the water goes a funny grey-brown colour (it will). Avoid vigorous scrubbing or wringing, although if you notice some stubborn spots (like that tomato sauce), then you can gently rub or scrub this off with a soft brush such as the trusty old toothbrush.
  4. Drain the sink or bath, then run in some fresh water to rinse them and swirl this around. This will move the traces of soapy water and dirt. Then give it a second rinse.
  5. Remove the curtain from the bathtub. During drying, with thermal curtains, it’s very important to ensure that the curtain doesn’t fold onto itself so backing presses against the backing. Folding and sticking will damage the backing.
  6. Dry curtains hanging up. Don’t use pegs, as they will mark the fabric. Instead, use the curtains’ own hooks and rings (yes, you’ll have to put them back on through all that wet, soggy material). Don’t squeeze or wring the curtains before hanging.
  7. Once the curtains are dry, check them for wrinkles. If you’re lucky, the drying process will have worked out all the creases and wrinkles, thanks to gravity and the weight of the curtain. If you’re not, then you may have to iron the curtains. If you do, use the iron on low and only run the iron on the “right” side rather than the side with the backing.
  8. Hang the curtains back up again, tightening up the pleats if that’s the sort they are. Don’t forget to clean the curtain track and the pelmet before you hang them up!

Well, here it is, my handy, quick, rather short, but very useful guide on what to do with your curtains before you move out of your rented accommodation.

Time for a little disclaimer. The above steps and procedures work for me, and have done so many times in the past. However, they may not work for you, as curtains are made of so many different fabrics and materials. Use the above wisely and deploy massive amounts of common sense.

You’ve been warned :-).

Cleaning Was Always The Number One Option

I have probably read a hundred cleaning-related blogs (I don’t exaggerate, it is a kind of lame hobby), and it is easy to notice the common thread. Even successful cleaners with long years in the industry or business owners admit that cleaning came their way accidentally or wasn’t their dream job and first choice. I guess I will have to be the exception that proves the rule.

Hi, my name is Marie Wynter, and I have been an end of tenancy cleaner in one of the most successful local teams in Wimbledon for nearly fifteen years. I’ve got so many funny and interesting stories to tell, but I decided my first blog post to be about my background and how cleaning has almost been my destiny since the cradle.

My story begins even before I was born in 1984. My mother was a chemical engineer (she retired a few years ago) who created the formula for one of the UK’s most successful and well-known floor-cleaning detergents. My Dad was a cleaning entrepreneur who started his first business at age 23 en route to becoming one of the leading carpet-cleaning specialists in South West London. Some of their good friends jokingly called them “The Wimbledon power couple of cleaning”, and while I didn’t understand what it meant, I do remember people visiting our house to ask Dad for professional advice – both technical and career-related.

I had my first cleaning job when I was seven years old (I kid you not!). Actually, my Mom doesn’t know about this, so I hope she doesn’t read this blog – otherwise, Dad will be in trouble. He picked me up from school, and we were supposed to go cake-hunting for Mom’s birthday, but he had squeezed in a “quick” carpet-washing appointment. I ended up helping him pour the detergents, move small items around, and ensure the rotating cleaner’s cable did not get all tangled up. Only later did I find out that he had ordered the cake in advance and everything had gone according to plan – no problem with me, I had a royal time running after the carpet cleaning machine.

By the time I was thirteen, I often accompanied him on cleaning appointments during the weekends. While my classmates and friends were obsessing about the latest Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings movies, I could explain the difference between steam washing and hot water extraction, what was the best way to treat a fresh coffee stain, how not to clean a window, or how to communicate with a landlord for a tenancy cleaning job. Of course, at this age, I just wanted to spend more time with my Dad, but in retrospect, I recognise that the world of professional cleaning had become a natural part of my everyday life.

If I took my love for cleaning from my Dad, I inherited the ability to analyse a problem from every angle using logical arguments from my Mom. She used to tease Dad that he was the muscle and she was the brains of the operation, which rarely elicited a negative response. In my last year in high school, I had already decided – I wanted to be a professional cleaner. I had analysed the issue and prepared my arguments for the whirlwind I was about to face.

To my surprise, the negative reaction came from Dad. He had always seen me accompanying him at cleaning jobs as the perfect way to spend more time with his only child, not picking up the trade. At first, he waved it off as a momentary whim, then tried to talk me out of it for hours. It was a back-breaking job; I could achieve so much more if I put my mind to anything else, and so on. But he could not answer a simple question: If the job was so bad, why had he done it for nearly thirty years with such delight and success? Finally, he resignedly waved his hand, saying, “You are just like your Mom, there is no chance of winning an argument with you!”

Mom’s initial support compounded my surprise. Years later, she admitted that she had expected my infatuation with cleaning to run its course in a few months, and I returned to my senses. So she asked Dad to back off.
If that was their plan, it misfired royally. I started working as a domestic cleaner for one of London’s leading home cleaning agencies in 2004. Three years later, I switched to end of tenancy cleaning, which professionals in the industry consider somewhat of a “horizontal promotion”.

My tenancy cleaning background

In 2008, I received an offer I could not refuse – to join a Wimbledon start-up as a crew supervisor and build something from the ground up. Life has a twisted sense of irony – I had watched dozens of young professionals come to visit my Dad for advice, and now I was about to do the same.

By then, his anger and disappointment with my career choice had dissipated. They had given way to surprise and then silent pride in my advancement. So when I found him in the backyard of our house (he had taken up gardening, of all hobbies), he didn’t have much to say. “Most kids who came for advice back in the day didn’t know what they wanted. They had stumbled upon cleaning and were surprised they were good at it or wanted a shortcut to easy money. You are neither. You have a true heart and a good head on your shoulders, follow your gut, and it will tell you the right answer.”

There, in thirty seconds, was the jump start to where I am today. It was the best professional advice I could have wanted, given by the person most responsible for my career path. And while I don’t believe in fate or predestination, cleaning barely had an alternative.