Scarborough has changed a great deal in ten years, and the practical result for a cleaner is that a good share of the homes we visit here are apartments rather than houses. That sounds like a small distinction. It is not. Almost everything about how a visit is planned changes depending on which one you live in.
Scarborough covers three quite different kinds of home. There are the newer apartment buildings near the beachfront, older two and three storey unit blocks set back from the coast, and the original houses on standard blocks further inland. A quote that works for one of them is close to meaningless for the others.
So the first thing we ask is what you actually live in, how many bedrooms and bathrooms, and which level you are on. That takes thirty seconds and it is the difference between a price that holds and a price that gets revised after the first visit.
The defining feature of apartment cleaning is that there is nowhere to put anything. In a house you can move a chair into the hall, stack things on a dining table, put a basket in the spare room. In a two bedroom apartment every surface is already doing a job.
What that means in practice is that clear surfaces get cleaned properly and covered surfaces get worked around. We are not going to relocate your belongings to make a bench look better in a photograph, and we are certainly not going to decide what should be thrown out. If you would like a bench, a table or a section of floor genuinely cleared and cleaned, tell us and we will plan the time for it and put things back where they were.
Storage cuts both ways too. Small homes often have no cupboard for a vacuum or a mop, which is fine, because we bring our own rather than expecting yours to be there.
A house has a verge bin and a clothes line. Most apartments have neither, and both of those absences change the job.
Rubbish usually goes to a chute or a bin room, often on another level. If taking the bins out is part of what you need help with, tell us where it actually goes, because a bin room in a basement is a different task from wheeling a bin to a kerb.
Drying is the other one. Without a line, washing goes on a rack indoors, and a full rack in a closed apartment puts a lot of moisture into a small volume of air. If laundry is part of the visit, and it can be, we will work out with you when it goes on so it is dry before it starts causing problems rather than sitting damp for two days.
Living this close to the water leaves a fine salt film on glass, balcony railings and window frames, and it comes back. It is not dirt in the ordinary sense and it does not respond to being wiped with a dry cloth.
Balconies and the inside of the glass are straightforward to include if you want them, either every visit or on a rotation. What we will not do is anything that involves leaning out, working over a railing or cleaning the outside face of glass above ground level. That is a job for people with the right equipment and it is not one a cleaner should be improvising at height.
Smaller homes take less time per visit, which means a shorter cycle is often affordable where it would not be in a large house. A weekly visit in a one or two bedroom apartment is a genuinely realistic option, and in a small space the difference between weekly and monthly is very visible.
Fortnightly remains the most common choice. Monthly suits people who manage most of it themselves. Occasional visits with no set pattern are fine too. Start somewhere and change it once you have seen how it sits.
Deep cleans cover what a routine visit does not reach: inside the oven, rangehood filters, door and window tracks, skirtings, and behind whatever can be moved safely in a tight space.
Vacate cleans are common in Scarborough because a lot of the apartment stock is rented. If you are handing an apartment back, tell us at the quote stage, because an outgoing inspection looks at ovens, tracks, screens and glass far more closely than anyone living there ever does.
Cleaning is not automatically part of an NDIS plan. Where it is funded, household tasks have been included as a support that relates to the participant’s disability, worked out from their goals, their assessed needs and the supports already approved for them. It is an individual decision and there is no standard answer.
We are a Registered NDIS Provider, registration number 4053371406. We are not able to tell you what your plan will pay for. That is a question for your plan manager, support coordinator or NDIA contact, and it is worth settling before a regular booking starts.
If you share the apartment with a partner, family or a housemate, funded cleaning relates to your own disability-related support needs. It is not general housekeeping for everyone at the address. In a small home that line matters more than it sounds, because requests drift easily when everything is in one room, so we write down what is included.
Self-managed participants book directly with us and we invoice you. Plan-managed participants pass on their plan manager’s details and we invoice there. NDIA-managed participants need a registered provider, which we are, and the claim goes through the agency.
Apartment access needs sorting once rather than every fortnight. Some buildings want visitors signed in with a building manager, some restrict which lift can be used at certain hours, and many have no visitor parking whatsoever, which affects what time a cleaner can realistically arrive and how equipment gets upstairs.
Tell us your building’s arrangements at the start and we will plan around them. It is far better than a cleaner standing in a lobby waiting for someone to buzz them through.
We go through it with you first, in person or by phone: the rooms, the building, the access, what needs the most attention and anything that should not be touched. You get a written quote before any work happens, and a time that suits both you and the building.
We also clean in Doubleview, Innaloo, Trigg, North Beach, Watermans Bay, Karrinyup, Gwelup, Carine, Hamersley, Woodlands, Wembley Downs, Churchlands, Herdsman, Glendalough, Osborne Park, Balcatta, City Beach and Floreat.
See also our City of Stirling page, our Perth NDIS cleaning page and the full Western Australia suburb list.
Yes, and a large part of our Scarborough work is apartments. The quote is based on the actual home rather than a flat rate per suburb.
The floor, the railing from the inside and the glass we can safely reach, yes. Anything requiring leaning out or working over the edge, no.
Yes, if we know where it is and that it is part of the job. Tell us at the quote rather than on the day.
It is common here and it is workable. We just need to know in advance so the visit is timed sensibly rather than starting with a lap of the block.
Call 1300 525 336 or email info@smurfettescleaningservice.net, tell us whether your Scarborough home is a house, a unit or an apartment in a tower, and we will quote the job that actually exists.
Phone: 1300 525 336
Email: info@smurfettescleaningservice.net
