On a listed cottage off Stoneham Street the clerk does not start at the oven. They run a finger along the chamfered underside of an exposed oak beam, where a winter of woodsmoke and lath dust settles into the carving, because that line was photographed at check-in.
That is what an end of tenancy clean in Coggeshall answers to: not a tidy flat, but the report a clerk wrote on your first day. Monster Cleaning has worked CO6 since 2014, at a fixed price by bedroom count, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against the check-out report itself. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price.
Last updated June 2026. We cover CO6 1 across the whole conservation-area centre, the Stoneham Street and Church Street terraces, Market Hill and West Street, the East Street side toward the surgery, and out past Paycocke’s House and the Tilkey Road edges. This page sits inside the county directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Essex.
How the check-in report quietly decides your deposit
End of tenancy cleaning
from £176
For a studio, fixed by property size, agreed before we start.
Get your price0333 555 2076 · 8am to 7pm
Start with the mechanism, because hardly anyone does, and in Coggeshall it is most of the game. Your deposit is settled by two walks round the same property.
- When you moved in, a clerk walked the property and wrote a report describing every surface, almost always with photographs, usually with the words “good” or “as new” against the kitchen, the glazing and the joinery.
- At check-out a clerk walks it again and compares the two line by line.
- Anything materially worse than the check-in entry, past fair wear and tear, can be charged against your deposit.
You are not being marked against tidy. You are being marked against a dated photo set, and a mop and a free Saturday rarely lands you back at the photo.
- Where the money sits
- In one of three statutory schemes, which the agent has to account for. The money is real.
- How much
- Capped at five weeks’ rent under the rules.
The clerk is paid to find the gap between the check-in photo and the day you hand the keys back, so the walk-through is genuinely adversarial rather than a formality.
That is not unfair. It just means you turn up with the property returned to the photograph, not with a hopeful guess that it will do.
Why a listed cottage is judged differently from a new-build
Coggeshall is one of the densest concentrations of pre-1700 timber-framed buildings in England, and the housing stock tells you why the clerks here look at different things from the ones working a Braintree estate.
- The conservation area
- Close to 200 listed buildings since the designation in 1974. On Stoneham Street, Church Street and Market Hill almost every front door opens off a listed frontage.
- The landmarks
- Walk down toward the weatherboarded Clock Tower by the market place, or out to Thomas Paycocke’s clothier’s house of around 1509.
The deductions are unusual. On a 1990s box the clerk checks the shower screen for scale and the oven door for grease. On a CO6 1 cottage they are looking at:
- woodsmoke film on an original brick fireplace
- the cobweb dust held in the chamfering of an exposed tie-beam
- the haze on leaded glazing where a glass spray has fogged the cames
- watermarks on lath-and-plaster where a previous tenant ran a wet mop too close to a soft wall
None of that is obvious if you have never cleaned this stock, and all of it sits on the inventory at hand-back with a figure beside it.
The reason it costs so much is the listing: a damaged leaded pane or a marked beam cannot be swapped for a B&Q part, so the line is a heritage repair, not a trip to the trade counter.
You are not being marked against tidy. You are being marked against a dated photo set.
Braintree District covers Coggeshall, and on the rules the answer is simpler than tenants expect.
- Licensing
- The council runs mandatory HMO licensing for larger shared houses but has no borough-wide selective or additional scheme, so for a standard let nobody is adding a licence condition to your move-out.
- Conservation-area protection
- This is what does bite. Anything inside that touches a listed feature, a leaded pane, a beam, an old hearth, has to be put back properly, which is exactly why returning each feature to its check-in photo matters more here than on a modern flat.
What 1 May 2026 changed for a Coggeshall move-out
The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026. For a Coggeshall move-out it changed the timing and left the cleaning alone.
- Section 21
- No-fault evictions are gone.
- Existing tenancies
- Every existing assured shorthold tenancy in England has converted to a periodic tenancy.
- Notice
- A tenant can now give two months’ notice at any point rather than waiting out a fixed term.
- The cleaning
- This is the part people get wrong: it did not change at all. The check-in benchmark still applies, the deposit maths is exactly what it was the week before, and the clerk still compares the two reports.
What changed is timing. Coggeshall lets do not all end on a quarter day, and once tenants can leave on a rolling two months the move-outs spread out and get harder to predict.
The dull, money-saving takeaway: book the clean a little earlier than you used to, because a small firm covering a village has a limited number of crews for any given Friday.
The 57 things we go through, room by room
Every Coggeshall booking runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, built over a decade of local check-outs and adjusted on the day for the property in front of us. The full list comes with the job.
On a listed cottage the kitchen and bathroom rounds are the same as on a modern flat; the living and bedroom rounds add the heritage work. Here is the shape of it.
The kitchen, where the quick deductions live
The oven is properly cleaned, not wiped. Racks go to soak, the door glass is split where the door design allows so the brown film between the panels comes out, and the interior, fan, element and seals are done by hand.
Then the rest of the room:
- The cooker pulled out and the wall and floor behind it cleaned
- The extractor hood degreased inside and out, and the filter soaked or swapped
- Every cupboard, inside and out, including the deep awkward-cornered ones the older cottages run
- Fridge and freezer cleaned through once you have defrosted them
- Hob lifted and the under-rim wiped, control knobs off and washed
- Tiles and grout scrubbed back to a clean line
- Sink, taps and drainer descaled with something that takes the scale off without stripping the chrome
- Skirtings and the gaps behind the white goods, then everything put back
Bathrooms, the other place it goes wrong
Scale comes off the taps, shower head, screen and tiles first. Grout is scrubbed back as far as honest effort takes it, and photographed first where it is clearly past saving. Then the rest, in plain order.
- Toilet done properly: inside, under the rim, the base, behind the pan and the cistern, where the clerk always looks and nobody else does
- Shower screen both sides, the track and the sealant bead
- Bath, taps, the underside of the taps, overflow and plughole
- Mirror and any cabinet, and the wall behind where it pulls away
- Extractor cover off, the vent dusted, the cover refitted
- Floor into the corners and behind the basin pedestal
On a lot of CO6 cottages the bathroom is a 1980s retrofit dropped inside a listed shell, so we treat the room itself as modern but watch any beam or lath edge that abuts the door.
The heritage rounds: beams, hearths and leaded glass
This is the part a general cleaner misses.
- Joinery
- Skirtings, picture rails and architraves are dusted by hand.
- Exposed beams
- Cobweb dust along the chamfered edge of every exposed oak tie-beam is taken back with a soft-bristle brush and no chemical, because the clerk runs a finger along the chamfer rather than the flat face and anything that lifts goes on the report.
- Fireplaces
- Original brick and stone fireplace surrounds get a sympathetic wash that takes the soot film off the upper trim without soaking the brick or leaving a tide-mark.
- Lath-and-plaster walls
- Cleaned with a microfibre wrung almost dry. We never run a wet mop near one, because a watermark on lath is charged at re-paint cost.
- Leaded glazing
- Done by hand on damp cotton, pane by pane, never with a glass spray.
- Period staircases
- The handrail, the balusters and the dust line where the wall meets the underside of each tread are done by hand too.
If part of the work is all you need, we run oven cleaning and carpet cleaning as standalone jobs.
The original boards and quarry tiles common in these cottages take the right product under our floor cleaning service rather than a one-size mop.
Hard water, leaded glass and the scale nobody expects
Coggeshall is on hard water. Essex and Suffolk Water supplies CO6, and across this part of Essex the supply tends to run very hard, in the region of 300 to 320 parts per million.
- On a modern flat
- Scale on the shower head and a film on the tap.
- On a cottage with original leaded glazing
- Something the clerk knows to look for: a scale haze along the cames in the front bay and the stair window, where condensation runs and dries through every winter.
We do not put a glass spray near a leaded light. The lead reacts and the cames cloud, which is worse than the scale you started with. Instead:
- We use damp cotton in slow passes.
- On the worst panes, the ones that have taken a winter of woodsmoke and condensation, we go back twice with a soft cloth between passes.
It is slow and there is no clever shortcut, which is the point: it is the kind of detail that separates a clean that passes on Church Street from one that does not.
We do not put a glass spray near a leaded light. The lead reacts and the cames cloud.
What it costs, and the maths nobody runs in time
Pricing in Coggeshall is fixed by the size of the property, and the figures below are fixed prices, not quotes that creep. We add nothing for a listed building, because the cleaners who cover CO6 know period stock anyway and that knowledge is built into the price rather than charged on top.
| Property | Typical duration | Estimated cost |
|---|---|---|
| Studio or small flat above the High Street | 3-4 hours, 1-2 cleaners | From £176 |
| One-bed cottage or flat | 4-5 hours, 2 cleaners | From £227 |
| Two-bed listed cottage (Stoneham Street, Church Street) | 5-7 hours, 2 cleaners | From £263 |
| Three-bed period house or town house | 6-8 hours, 2 cleaners | From £359 |
| Four-bed house (Tilkey Road, modern infill) | 8-10 hours, 2-3 cleaners | From £445 |
| Carpet shampoo, per bedroom | Same visit | £29 |
| Carpet shampoo, living room | Same visit | £36 |
| Single oven add-on | Folded into the clean | £31 |
| Double oven add-on | Folded into the clean | £62 |
| Range cooker, 90cm | Folded into the clean | £62 |
By the hour, for a part-job or an unusual property, it is £30 per cleaner.
Those figures assume a property in normal lived-in shape. These cost more, and we say so on the phone rather than after:
- a long tenancy with heavy wear
- a wood-burner that has thrown soot about all winter
- a place that has not had a proper clean in years
Run the sums the way the deposit makes you: a one-bed at £227 against several weeks’ rent sitting in a scheme is not really a decision. Most tenants only do that arithmetic after they have failed the first check-out, which is the expensive way round.
Every Coggeshall booking carries a 48-hour re-clean guarantee. If your clerk flags a cleanliness issue within 48 hours, we come back and put it right at no charge, provided:
- the property is still as we left it
- nobody has moved in
The guarantee is the real reassurance.
Since 2014 the work has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across the South East, the village offices on Market Hill and Church Street among them.
Three jobs get muddled, and it is worth booking the right one.
- Check-in inventory report
- The document the clerk writes on day one, with photos, describing every surface. It is the benchmark your check-out is judged against, which is why we clean to it rather than to a general idea of clean.
- End-of-tenancy clean
- Built to pass that inventory and get the deposit back, property empty, the 48-hour guarantee on it, at a fixed price by bedroom count.
- Deep clean
- A deep clean resets a home you are keeping, lived-in, with no formal standard to hit, from £206: two cleaners for at least three hours, with the kit included.
- Regular domestic clean
- A regular domestic clean is ongoing upkeep, from £23 an hour weekly or £24 fortnightly.
Booking it around the village
Booking is quick, and most Coggeshall jobs are done on the keys.
- Ring 0333 555 2076 or email office@monstercleaning.com with the property type, the postcode, your check-out date and your letting agent. If the property is listed, say so, and tell us the grade if you know it. We price on the call.
- We confirm by email with the date, the crew size, the cleaners’ names and the fixed price. There is no charge for putting a cleaner who knows period stock on a listed job.
- Property empty when we arrive is the easy case: the crew can pull units out and the hand-back check is cleaner. Where a cottage is part-furnished with an original built-in dresser or settle, we work around the listed pieces and clean under and behind them.
- On the day the crew arrives at 9am unless you have asked for a later slot, runs the checklist, and calls you about 30 minutes before finishing so you can do a walk-through if you want one.
- Check-out happens. Anything flagged inside 48 hours, we come back and fix it free.
One honest note on access. The centre is tight and the town parking sits off Stoneham Street, so when you book, tell us both of these:
- Parking
- The arrangement, whether that is the public car park, a permit or a spot in the lane
- Access
- How we get in: a key safe, a drop-off, or the agent on Market Hill
Sorting that in advance takes the friction out of the day.
The same crews that cover Coggeshall work the rest of mid-Essex on the same routes, so if your next place is one over we also cover:
- Kelvedon
- Witham
- Braintree
- Colchester
Questions we get asked
Do you clean Grade II and Grade I listed properties in Coggeshall?
Yes, and most of our CO6 work is on listed stock. The village has Grade I buildings, including Paycocke’s House and the Grange Barn, and dense Grade II and II* listings on Stoneham Street, Church Street and Market Hill. The cleaners who cover Coggeshall know to use damp cotton on leaded glass, a soft-bristle brush on oak frames and a sympathetic wash on original brick hearths. There is no extra charge for the heritage work; it is in the standard clean.
How much is an end of tenancy clean for a one-bed cottage on Church Street?
From £227 for a one-bed. Add £31 for a single oven, £29 for a bedroom carpet shampoo and £36 for a living-room carpet. A typical one-bed cottage with the oven and one carpet add-on lands around £287 to £294 all in, and the figure is fixed before we start, not adjusted after.
Will you clean the carved beam in the front room?
Yes. Cobweb and lath dust in the chamfering of an exposed oak tie-beam is one of the standard CO6 deductions, because the clerk runs a finger along the chamfer at check-out. We take it back by hand with a soft-bristle brush and no chemical. It is included for any room with an exposed beam, and the testimonial above is exactly this job.
Can you clean the leaded glazing in the front bay without damaging it?
Yes. We never use a glass spray on a leaded light because the spray reacts with the cames and clouds them. We work pane by pane on damp cotton in slow passes, and on the worst panes, where a winter of woodsmoke and condensation has left a heavy scale haze, we go back twice with a soft cloth between passes. It is included, with no separate charge.
What about the soot on the original brick fireplace?
Soot film along the upper trim of an original brick or stone surround is the classic Coggeshall hearth deduction, and a wood-burner makes it worse. We do a sympathetic wash that lifts the soot without soaking the brick or leaving a wet tide-mark. We do not paint, seal or treat it. Just clean it back, and it is included.
Do you clean lath-and-plaster walls?
Carefully, and never wet. Lath-and-plaster cannot take a soaked cloth or a mop, because a watermark on lath is charged at re-paint cost by the clerk; the wall cannot be patched without a specialist plasterer. We use a microfibre wrung almost dry and keep mops well away from any soft old wall. Damp, never wet, is the rule, and the cleaner who covers CO6 knows the difference.
Is the water really that hard in Coggeshall?
Yes. Essex and Suffolk Water supplies CO6 and across this area the supply runs very hard, roughly 300 to 320 parts per million. On modern fittings that is scale on the shower head and taps; on a period cottage it shows as a scale haze on leaded panes where winter condensation dries. We descale chrome without harming the plating and clean leaded glass by hand rather than chemically.
Do I need an HMO licence or any council scheme for a Coggeshall let?
For a standard family let, no. Braintree District Council runs mandatory HMO licensing for larger shared houses but has no borough-wide selective or additional licensing scheme, so there is no licence condition attached to a normal move-out. The conservation-area rules apply to the building, not to your clean, but they are why listed features have to be returned to their check-in condition properly.
Do you cover the modern houses on the Tilkey Road edge as well as the old centre?
Yes. The newer infill and the family houses on the Tilkey Road side are a different job from the listed centre: integrated extractors, sealed double glazing, full fitted carpet, modern boiler cupboards. We price both by bedroom count and brief the crew on the day for which kind of property they are walking into.
What time do the cleaners arrive, and how many?
9am unless you have booked a later slot. A one-bed cottage is usually two cleaners for four to five hours; a four-bed house runs two to three cleaners for most of the day. We call you about 30 minutes before we finish so you can do a walk-through.
What if my letting agent flags something on the inventory?
The 48-hour re-clean guarantee covers it. If anything on the clerk’s report came from our work, or was missed by us, we come back at no charge and put it right, provided you tell us within 48 hours and nobody has moved in. We need the clerk’s report or the inventory note to work from.
Do I have to be there during the clean?
No. Most Coggeshall bookings run on the keys: you drop them with us or the agent in the morning, the crew lets themselves in, and you collect them at hand-back. We call you 30 minutes before finishing if you want to do a walk-through.
How early should I book, and can I get a price without a visit?
For a Friday or Saturday slot in the summer move-out season, two weeks is sensible; a midweek slot in winter is usually fine at a week. We sometimes have a same-day slot if a booking shifts, so it is worth asking. You do not need a site visit: the price is set by property size and add-ons, so ring 0333 555 2076 with the postcode, the property type, your check-out date and your agent, and we quote on the call with a written confirmation by email.
Other Monster Cleaning services in Coggeshall
Staying put rather than moving out? We also offer carpet cleaning in Coggeshall, oven cleaning in Coggeshall and domestic cleaning in Coggeshall.