Strata Cleaning Inner West and North Shore

Strata cleaning Inner West schemes complain about follows a pattern so consistent you could set a calendar by it. The foyer looks fine — the foyer always looks fine, because it is the one space the cleaner knows the committee walks through. Then somebody goes down to the bin room in February. Somebody else uses the fire stairs for the first time in a year. And it turns out that everything more than twenty metres from the front door has been getting a glance rather than a clean.

This is not laziness so much as economics. Strata contracts are won on price, and the cheapest way to win one is to quote the visible areas and treat the rest as optional. So the honest version of this page is a list of the places we go that a cheap quote does not — and, in this part of Sydney, a note about what the building is made of.

Heritage surfaces, and the chemical that ruins them

The Inner West runs on old stock. Tessellated entry tiles, oiled or waxed hardwood, lead-light glass, lime-mortar brick — Balmain, Annandale and the terraced streets off Newtown are full of it, and the 1960s and 70s red-brick walk-ups of Dee Why and Kogarah bring their own terrazzo and vinyl. All of it punishes the wrong chemical. An alkaline stripper on original tessellated tile etches the glaze, and the etch does not come back. So every original surface gets pH-neutral chemistry and a soft pad, and the timber is damp-mopped rather than flooded. We set the whole of this out, era by era, in our guide to Sydney building types and how to clean them.

The bin room, which is the whole argument

In an Inner West or North Shore block the bin room is almost always the worst space and almost always the least specified. It is frequently below grade, reached down a ramp, poorly ventilated, and it deteriorates every single day whether anybody cleans it or not. By late summer it announces itself from the lift.

It needs a program rather than a wipe. Chutes and hoppers cleaned on a cycle. The floor washed and deodorised, not just swept. The bins themselves rotated and rinsed rather than merely wheeled out. The bay pressure-washed on a day when the bins are actually present to be moved — which means scheduling it away from garbage day, a detail that sounds trivial and is the reason most bin bays have never been washed underneath.

Fire stairs, landings and the places nobody looks

Fire stairs collect exactly what you would expect: dust, cobwebs, dropped rubbish, the occasional item somebody could not be bothered taking to the bin room. They are also a compliance space. We clean the treads, the landings, the handrails and the risers on rotation, and if we find something blocking an egress path we photograph it and tell you, because that is a matter for the committee rather than something a cleaner should quietly move and forget.

Lifts, and the tracks everybody ignores

The lift car gets cleaned everywhere. The floor, the walls, the mirror, the button panel — which is the single most touched surface in the building — and, critically, the door tracks. Tracks fill with grit and hair, they jam, and a jammed lift door generates more owner emails than any other single fault. Cleaning the track is thirty seconds of work that prevents a callout.

The car park, the ramp and what the street brings in

Every car that comes down the ramp brings the street with it. The ramp is the dirtiest surface in the building after the bin bay, and it feeds directly into the basement. Sweeping the car park, treating oil drips, and washing the ramp on a cycle stops that migrating up into the lift lobby. For a scheme with a lot of turnover, this is where a surprising amount of the foyer’s grime is actually coming from.

Reporting, because committees are volunteers

After every visit the committee — or the strata manager, whichever you nominate — receives a report with dated photographs of the common areas, plus anything we found that a cleaner cannot fix. A dripping tap in the laundry. An extraction fan that has stopped. A lifting tile on the entry path. Committee members are volunteers with day jobs who cannot personally inspect the fire stairs each week, and a cleaner nobody is checking is a cleaner who eventually stops checking themselves.

Working with your strata manager

Some schemes want the manager to hold the relationship. Others have an engaged committee that would rather deal with the supervisor directly. We are genuinely indifferent, provided it is clear who approves a scope change and who receives the photographs. Our certificates of currency go to the strata manager directly, and if your building has an insurer or a compliance requirement that needs sighting, we send it to them rather than making a committee member forward PDFs.

If your scheme has a genuinely complex common-property problem — a heritage-tiled foyer, a shared driveway across two lots, a bin room that floods — call 1300 494 983 and ask for the supervisor who covers your region. Our strata cleaning specialists have seen the version of it that is worse than yours.