In a Market Street cottage the clerk runs a finger along the top of the beams before anything else, because that is where a checklist written for a flat misses. Old Harlow is two cleans in one postcode: the listed timber-framed core around Market Street and Mulberry Green, and the Gibberd-era terraces that wrap it.
We are Monster Cleaning Ltd, a domestic firm working across Essex since 2014, and an end of tenancy clean here is built to satisfy the person who writes the check-out report, priced by bedroom count, and carried on a 48-hour re-clean guarantee. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price.
Last updated June 2026. We cover the whole of Old Harlow and the CM17 postcodes, from the village core out to Churchgate Street, Mulberry Green and the New Town housing on the fringe. This page sits inside the county directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Essex.
How the clean and the hand-back actually work
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
The report written on your first day is the standard held against you on your last. Match it, document the match, and the deposit conversation is short.
- When you took the place on, a clerk walked it and wrote a check-in inventory: every surface described, dated photographs against each room, the kitchen and bathroom usually marked clean or as new because the property had just been turned around.
- At the end a clerk walks it again and compares the two reports line by line.
- Anything materially worse than the check-in entry, past fair wear and tear, is chargeable against your deposit.
The clean only matters in relation to that one document. You are not being marked against tidy, but against that opening report.
Managed lets in the old core
Almost every let in the old core is managed rather than let direct, and a managed let means a proper documented check-in at the start and a third-party check-out at the end.
Geoffrey Matthew Estates work out of The Gables at 1 Fore Street and handle a large share of CM17 lettings; other firms along the High Street do the same.
- Good news
- For a tenant who cleans to the report, because the standard is consistent and written down.
- Bad news
- For a tenant who mops the floor on the last Sunday and hopes.
How we close the gap
Our job is to close the gap between the two reports so there is nothing for the clerk to log.
- We clean to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, the full version of which comes with the booking.
- We ask for the check-in inventory or the clerk’s photos so we work to your property rather than a generic idea of clean. If the inventory marked the inglenook brick clean, the inglenook brick is what we hit.
The deposit sits in a government-backed scheme, and if a charge goes to dispute the adjudicator reads the inventory, the report and the photographs, not your account of how the place felt. Evidence settles it, which is why we leave a dated photo set with the invoice.
Behind that sits the re-clean. Every Old Harlow booking carries a 48-hour re-clean guarantee: if the clerk flags something we should have cleaned, tell us within 48 hours and we come back and put it right at no charge, provided:
- nobody has moved in
- the property is in the state we left it
We ask for the clerk’s note so we go straight to the listed items rather than re-doing the lot. The guarantee is the real point, because a failed check-out is the expensive way to find out what was missed.
You are not being marked against tidy. You are being marked against the report written on the day you moved in.
The 57 things, room by room in a period cottage
End of tenancy is the hand-back clean, the full reset to in-going condition, and in the old core it has to reach the things a period property hides. Here is the shape of the 57-point list.
The kitchen
The oven is the single most flagged item in any check-out, cottage or terrace alike, so it is cleaned by hand rather than wiped:
- the door glass degreased, between the panes too where the door comes apart
- the racks and runners out to soak
- the roof of the cavity, fan and seals all done
Then the rest of the kitchen:
- The hob and any extractor canopy come apart for the grease, filter included
- We pull the appliances where they move so the floor and wall behind go too
- We decalcify the kettle and the washing-machine drawer the chalk water silts up
- We wipe inside and on top of every unit
In a low cottage kitchen the unit tops and the dust on the beam above the cooker get cleaned as well, because that is exactly the height a clerk’s eye lands.
The bathroom
This is where the hard water shows, and an Old Harlow bathroom is often the room a check-out turns on. Every fitting is descaled with a proper acidic remover rather than smeared over:
- the taps and the dull film under them
- the shower screen and its channel, and the head
- the tiles and grout
- the toilet, including below the waterline where scale builds a brown ring
Period bathrooms in the village core often run older or reproduction fittings, awkward tiled corners and one small window with no extractor, which is why a bloom of mould sits on the ceiling above the bath where the steam gathers.
We treat that bloom so it does not come back in a fortnight and reappear in the clerk’s photos.
- Older chrome
- We bring it back to bright without scouring the plating.
- Enamel and reproduction ceramics
- The scale lifts without etching the glaze.
Bedrooms and living rooms
- Inside and on top of every fitted wardrobe and cupboard
- Skirtings and the deep period architraves
- Switches, sockets, radiators and the wall behind them
- Window glass on both faces where it opens, the sills, and the deep reveals an old wall gives you
- Beam faces and their top edges in the rooms that have them
- Doors and frames degreased around the handles
- Carpets vacuumed throughout, with shampoo as an add-on if the inventory calls for it
- Marks lifted off paintwork where they shift without taking the limewash too
Stairs, halls and the rest
- The staircase and any landing, and the hall
- Every internal door, top and bottom
- Light fittings and shades
- The cobwebs an old room collects in its ceiling corners
- Hard floors washed
- The cupboard under the stairs and the airing cupboard done
- The bin area cleared
Low lintels and the dust line along the top of the beams get specific attention, because in a cottage that is the first edge a clerk runs a finger along. None of it is hard. It is just easy to forget when the list in your head was written for square rooms.
What chalk water does to an Old Harlow bathroom
The water here is very hard, the clerk checks for scale on purpose, and that is why we descale every fitting rather than giving it a once-over.
- Supply
- Old Harlow sits on Affinity Water’s East supply, drawn from chalk aquifers and treated nearby at Sawbridgeworth.
- Hardness
- Around 340 mg of calcium carbonate per litre, well into the very hard band. You can confirm the figure for your own postcode on Affinity Water’s hardness page.
- What it costs you
- It is the second reason deposits get clipped here after the oven.
Scale builds on everything the water dries on, and a cloth does nothing to it once it has set.
The clerks know the water. They run a thumbnail down the tap, look at the shower screen edge-on against the light, and pull the head in close. The scale builds in places a quick wipe never reaches:
- under the taps
- in the screen channel
- on the loo below the waterline
- in the kettle
- in the washing-machine drawer the inventory photographed clean
So every bathroom and the kitchen get descaled properly, not wiped, and the scale that has gone into the chrome gets worked rather than scrubbed off with something that strips the finish.
It is dull, slow work. It is also the difference between a pass and a deduction more often than carpets ever are.
Old Harlow is the village, not the New Town centre
People conflate Old Harlow with Harlow, and they are not the same place. Old Harlow is the original medieval and Georgian village that predates the New Town.
The old village
- a market layout that goes back to a charter for a Monday market granted in 1218
- the old market place between Market Street and Fore Street
- the fair ground at Mulberry Green, with the Green Man coaching inn on it
The Old Harlow Conservation Area covers that core and holds around 40 listed buildings, the bulk grade II with a handful grade II*. The houses are timber-framed and Georgian:
- old tenements knocked into single dwellings
- a stuccoed Georgian front with the oak framing still showing on the side
- runs of early-19th-century cottages since combined
The rooms are the shape they are because of that history.
The New Town around it
Then, from 1947, Sir Frederick Gibberd master-planned Harlow New Town around the old village, and the housing his corporation put up from the early 1950s is a different job entirely: two-storey terraces and maisonettes, square rooms, flat ceilings, standard joinery. Gibberd himself settled in Old Harlow, which locals enjoy pointing out.
A check-out clean on the New Town side is faster per bedroom because there are no beam tops, no inglenook and no deep reveals, though the very hard water and the oven are still the flag items.
We price both the same by bedroom count and send whatever time the property needs. A three-bed cottage off Churchgate Street is not the same day’s work as a three-bed terrace toward the Stow.
Two stations, often mixed up
- Harlow Mill
- Off Station Road, the older station serving the Old Harlow end. It opened in 1842 on the line out of London Liverpool Street toward Cambridge.
- Harlow Town
- Two miles off on the New Town side. It opened in 1842 as Burnt Mill and was rebuilt and renamed in 1960 for the new town, and it is the busier of the two for commuters.
We cover lets near both stations, with the M11 and A414 close by.
If you are not sure your postcode counts as Old Harlow rather than central Harlow, ring 0333 555 2076 with it and we will tell you in a few seconds. We also clean nearby, including end of tenancy cleaning in Sawbridgeworth a couple of stops up the line.
Conservation fabric stays, so it gets cleaned
In a listed or conservation cottage a landlord cannot simply rip out a stained timber window or a marked period door and fit a modern replacement between tenants. That is the complication the New Town side does not have.
The fabric stays, so it gets cleaned and handed on. The check-out clerk inspects these as fixtures that have to come back to the in-going state:
- the original joinery
- the beam faces
- the brick of the inglenook
- the limewashed plaster
In a Gibberd-era terrace a tired frame is a maintenance item the landlord swaps. In a Market Street cottage the painted softwood casement is part of what you are handing back.
The rules around the old core have tightened
- Two conservation areas
- The village core itself, designated back in 1969, and the separate Churchgate Street Conservation Area up the lane toward St Mary’s.
- Article 4 direction
- Harlow Council made one over Churchgate Street on 3 March 2025, and it came into force on 4 March 2026, so it is live now. It removes permitted-development rights for things like exterior cladding, replacement external windows and doors, and porches, which means owners need planning consent for work that used to be automatic. You can read the council’s notice on the Churchgate Street Article 4 page.
- Licensing
- Harlow Council runs the standard mandatory HMO licence for larger shared houses (broadly five or more occupants forming two or more households) but has not brought in selective or additional licensing across the district, so most family lets in the core do not need a property licence. If your let is a shared house, check with the council before the tenancy turns over.
For a tenant cleaning at hand-over the practical effect is simple: the period fabric is staying put, so it is on you to hand it back clean, and on us to get it there without stripping wax or finishes.
We do not alter or remove any fabric; we clean it, and anything structural is the landlord’s planning concern under that Article 4 direction.
- Check-in inventory
- The report the clerk writes on day one, with photos, describing every surface. It is the benchmark the check-out is judged against, which is why we clean to it.
- End of tenancy clean
- The move-out hand-back, scoped against that inventory and judged by a third-party clerk. It goes further into ovens, descaling and the hidden faces than a deep clean, because it has to match a document.
- Deep clean
- A heavy one-off reset for a home you are staying in, with no inventory to hit. Useful, but not what gets a deposit back.
- Regular domestic clean
- Ongoing weekly or fortnightly upkeep for a lived-in home. A different service again.
What 1 May 2026 changed, and what it did not
The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026. The part people get wrong is the clean: none of it changed. What changed is timing.
- 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 in the year rather than waiting for a fixed term to end.
- The clean
- A tenant still hands the property back in the in-going condition, allowing for fair wear and tear, and a documented hand-over clean is still the cleanest way to get the full deposit back without a scheme dispute.
Let tenants leave on a rolling two months instead of a fixed end date and the move-outs get more frequent and less predictable.
So the dull advice pays for itself: book the clean as soon as your hand-over date is fixed, because the slot you want will be gone if you wait.
What it costs, and the sum nobody runs in time
Flat pricing by property size, the same figure we quote on the phone.
| Property | Typical duration | Estimated cost |
|---|---|---|
| Studio flat | 3 to 4 hours, 1 cleaner | £176 |
| 1-bed cottage or flat | 4 to 5 hours, 2 cleaners | £227 |
| 2-bed (Market Street cottage or Gibberd terrace) | 5 to 7 hours, 2 cleaners | £263 |
| 3-bed house | 6 to 8 hours, 2 cleaners | £359 |
| 4-bed house | 8 to 10 hours, 2 to 3 cleaners | £445 |
- Part-cleans
- If you only need part of the property cleaned, it is £30 per cleaner per hour. A full hand-over is the fixed price, tied to the result, not the clock.
- Carpet shampoo
- An add-on: £29 a bedroom, £36 for a living room, or £94 for the whole carpeted floor of a two-bed.
- Standalone oven
- Booked on its own rather than as part of the full clean: £97 for a single, £130 for a double and £163 for a 90cm range.
- Period cottages
- A cottage with original timber and uneven floors takes longer than a square terrace of the same size. The price does not change; we just send the time the job needs.
Now run the sum the deposit makes you run.
- The legal deposit cap is five weeks’ rent.
- Local two-bed rents are around £1,400 a month.
- So a typical deposit here sits well over £1,500.
A two-bed clean at £263 to protect that is not really a decision, yet most tenants only do the maths after they have failed the check-out and lost the first round. The first round is the cheap one to win.
Over the years this work has put roughly £1.2m of tenants’ deposits back in their pockets, and we are on the books of 300+ letting agents.
A standalone oven clean covers it if the oven is the only thing the agent flagged, and carpet cleaning goes on the same visit when the inventory asks for hot-water extraction.
No surprise lines on the invoice: if a long, heavily worn or pet-household let is going to take longer, we say so on the call rather than after.
Booking it around the month-end rush
Book as soon as your hand-over date is fixed. The steps are short.
- Mid-month
- Two or three days’ notice is usually enough.
- End and start of the month
- The busy window, because tenancies turn over then.
- Ring 0333 555 2076 or email office@monstercleaning.com. Give us the postcode, the property size and the hand-over date, and send the check-in inventory if you have it so we clean straight to it.
- We book you in, ideally the day before the clerk comes so there is a buffer. A couple of phone photos of the kitchen and bathroom sharpen the quote.
- Property empty when we arrive. Furniture and belongings out so we can reach every surface the inventory covers. If a few items are left, or you want a man-and-van removal alongside, tell us when you book and we will sort the order of the day.
- We clean and leave the photo set. Every room, before and after, with the invoice. That is your evidence pack if the check-out tries to deduct.
- Anything flagged inside 48 hours, we come back free.
You do not need to be there.
- Most clients leave a key with the agent on Fore Street or in a key safe, and we collect, clean and confirm when it is done.
- If you would rather walk the property with us at the end before the clerk arrives, that is fine too.
Questions we get asked
How much is end of tenancy cleaning in Old Harlow?
A studio is £176, a one-bed £227, a two-bed £263, a three-bed £359 and a four-bed £445. That is the all-in figure for the standard hand-over clean against the inventory. Carpet shampoo and standalone oven cleans are add-ons on top.
Do you clean listed and conservation-area cottages in the old core?
Yes, that is a lot of our Old Harlow work. We clean original timber, beam faces, inglenook brick and limewashed plaster back to the in-going condition without stripping wax or finishes. We do not alter or remove any fabric. With the Churchgate Street Article 4 direction now in force, swaps and repairs are the landlord’s planning concern, not a cleaning one.
Does the hard water here really affect a check-out?
It does. Affinity Water’s supply runs around 340 mg per litre of calcium carbonate, which is very hard, so scale builds fast on taps, screens, kettles and toilets. Clerks in CM17 check for it on purpose, which is why every bathroom and the kitchen get properly descaled rather than wiped over.
What is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee?
If the clerk flags something we should have cleaned, tell us within 48 hours and we come back and put it right at no charge, as long as nobody has moved in. We ask for the check-out report or the clerk’s note so we go straight to the listed items. It is standard on every hand-over clean.
Can you work to my agent’s inventory and check-out report?
Yes, and we prefer to. Send the check-in inventory or the clerk’s photos and we clean to that document rather than a generic list. Most Old Harlow lets run through the Fore Street and High Street agents, including Geoffrey Matthew Estates, and we are used to their check-out standard.
Is Old Harlow priced the same as central Harlow and the New Town?
The price is by bedroom count, the same across Old Harlow and the New Town side. A period cottage takes longer than a square terrace of the same size, so we send more time, but the figure does not move. You pay for the property size.
How far ahead should I book?
Two or three days is usually enough mid-month. End and start of the month is the busiest window because tenancies turn over then, so if your hand-over date is fixed, book as soon as you have it to hold the slot.
Do I need to be there for the clean?
No. Most clients leave a key with the agent on Fore Street or in a key safe and we collect, clean and confirm when it is done. If you want to walk the property with us before the clerk comes, that works too.
Does the property need to be empty first?
It should be clear of your belongings and furniture so we can reach every surface the inventory covers. If a few items are left, or you need a man-and-van removal alongside the clean, tell us when you book and we will plan the order of the day.
Do you do the carpets and the oven as part of it?
The full oven clean is an add-on to the standard clean, from £31. Carpet shampoo is a separate add-on too, because not every check-out needs it. If the inventory specifies professional carpet cleaning, we quote it with the clean so there is one price and one visit.
What if the cottage has a wood-burner or an inglenook?
We take soot haze off the surrounding brick and timber and clear the hearth back to the in-going look. We do not sweep flues, which is a chimney sweep’s job. If the check-in photos show the fireplace clean, we get it back to that.
Do I need an HMO or property licence in Old Harlow?
For an ordinary family let, no. Harlow Council runs the standard mandatory HMO licence for larger shared houses, broadly five or more people in two or more households, but has not brought in selective or additional licensing across the district. If your let is a shared house, check with the council before the tenancy turns over.
Which areas around Old Harlow do you also cover?
The whole of CM17 including Churchgate Street, Mulberry Green and the Gibberd housing, plus Sawbridgeworth, Harlow town and out toward the wider Essex and Hertfordshire border. Ask when you call if your postcode is on the edge.
Other Monster Cleaning services in Old Harlow
Staying put rather than moving out? We also offer carpet cleaning in Old Harlow, oven cleaning in Old Harlow and domestic cleaning in Old Harlow.