An inventory clerk on the South Oxhey estate goes to the kitchen extractor filter first, because on a 1940s LCC galley kitchen it is the one thing that has often never been pulled out in the whole tenancy, and a greasy filter over a gleaming hob is the fastest deduction they write.
That is the job here: not a tidy the night before the keys go back, but a clean built to satisfy the person filling in the check-out report.
We are Monster Cleaning Ltd, a domestic cleaning company running since 2014, and end-of-tenancy work across Oxhey and South Oxhey is a big part of what we do most weeks. It runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist at a fixed price by bedroom count, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee behind it. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price.
Last updated June 2026. We cover the whole of WD19, both sides of the railway, plus the surrounding parts of Watford, Bushey and Carpenders Park. This page sits inside the county directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Hertfordshire.
One postcode, two Oxheys, and why it changes the clean
End of tenancy cleaning
from £156
For a studio, fixed by property size, agreed before we start.
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Oxhey is two places that share a WD19 postcode and almost nothing else, and the difference decides how a clean is built.
- North of the railway
- Oxhey village proper, the older settlement near Bushey station: interwar and period terraces, larger houses out along Oxhey Lane and Hampermill Lane, the odd Edwardian villa.
- South of the line
- On the far side of Oxhey Park is the big estate, South Oxhey.
The South Oxhey estate
South Oxhey is an out-county overspill scheme the London County Council laid out from the late 1940s on roughly 920 acres bought from the Blackwell family, the mustard-and-soup family, for £199,500.
- The first tenants moved into Hayling Road in November 1947.
- Around 3,850 homes were up by 1952 to house some 16,000 Londoners.
- Every street on the estate was named after a golf course, which is why a clerk’s diary can read Prestwick Road, then Gosforth Lane, then Hayling Road, then Muirfield, all in one afternoon.
Two kinds of stock
The stock tells the same two-part story.
- The original LCC houses
- Short terraces and semis, three-bed family houses and smaller two-bed cottages, built fast and plainly with the kitchens and bathrooms of their day. A large slice went under Right to Buy over the years, so much of the rental market now is ex-council houses in private hands, with the rest held as social stock.
- The newer layer
- The South Oxhey Central regeneration off Oxhey Drive cleared the tired old precinct and put up a new square, a bigger food store and several hundred flats finished around 2022.
One clean is a 1948 ex-LCC three-bed off Hayling Road with a kitchen re-fitted twice and a bathroom that has not been touched since. The next is a two-year-old flat by the square where the only real issue is builder-grade everything and scale already biting the chrome.
Both lose deposits, for opposite reasons, and a clean built for one is wrong for the other.
Which council
One more thing tenants and out-of-area firms get wrong.
- South Oxhey
- It is not in Watford at all, for the council that matters. It sits in Watford Rural parish under Three Rivers District Council, even though the postal town says Watford and the postcode is WD19.
- Oxhey village
- North of the line, this is the part that falls under Watford Borough Council.
We work both, and knowing which side you are on matters the moment a licensing or a council question comes up.
A clean built for the estate and a clean built for the new flats by the square are not the same clean.
How the check-out report quietly decides your deposit
Start with the mechanism, because hardly anyone does, and it is the whole game. A tenancy deposit is the landlord’s money to claim against, not yours to spend down, and in England it has to sit in one of three government-backed schemes for the length of the let.
- When you moved in, a clerk walked the property and wrote an inventory, usually with photos, describing every surface, often with the word “clean” against the kitchen and bathroom because they had just been done professionally.
- At check-out a clerk walks it again and compares line by line.
- Anything materially worse than that first day, beyond fair wear and tear, is chargeable back to you.
Cleaning is the single most common heading on those reports, and it is the one you have the most say over.
Two things sit behind all of this in law, and they pull opposite ways.
- The Tenant Fees Act 2019
- Your landlord cannot make professional cleaning a contractual condition, so nobody can force you to book us.
- Damp and mould
- These are a landlord repair obligation, not a tenant cleaning failure. Where we find genuine damp behind a wardrobe or in a cold bathroom corner we photograph it and note it, so the charge sits where it belongs rather than on you.
What 1 May 2026 changed for a WD19 move-out
The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026. 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 one.
- Notice
- A tenant can now give two months’ notice at any point rather than waiting for a fixed term to run out.
Here is the part people get wrong. The cleaning side of a move-out did not change at all:
- The Tenant Fees Act still applies.
- The check-in benchmark still applies.
- The sum on your deposit is exactly what it was the week before.
Let tenants leave on a rolling two months instead of a fixed end date and move-outs get more frequent and less predictable, so the end-of-month pile-up that already clogs WD19 is not going to ease.
The dull, useful takeaway: book the clean earlier than you used to, because the slot you want goes first.
The 57 things we work through, room by room
Every WD19 booking runs to a 57-point checklist built over years of local check-outs and tuned to what the clerks here actually flag. The full list comes with the job, or we walk you through it before we start.
Everything below is in the standard clean at no extra charge, except carpets and ovens, which are priced separately and listed further down because not every property needs them.
The kitchen, where most estate deposits go
The oven is the priced add-on, done inside if you book it. The rest of the room is standard:
- Hob and splashback degreased, control knobs off and washed.
- The extractor hood wiped inside and out and the grease filter pulled and degreased, which on the older galley kitchens around Hayling Road and Gosforth Lane is exactly where the clerk’s camera goes first.
- Every cupboard and drawer emptied and cleaned inside and out, doors and handles done, the tops of the wall units cleared of the dust and grease nobody else checks.
- Worktops, tiling and sink scrubbed, the tap and drainer descaled.
- Fridge and freezer emptied, defrosted, wiped and left open once you have switched them off.
- Washing machine drawer and door seal cleaned, dishwasher filter rinsed where one is fitted.
- Appliances pulled out so the gaps behind and under them are done, then put back.
- Floor vacuumed and washed.
The bathroom, the other place it goes wrong
Scale comes off first: shower screen, tiles, taps and showerhead descaled to clear the chalky film WD19 water leaves, sealant lines cleaned and checked. Then the rest, in plain order.
- Toilet done properly, inside, under the rim, the base, and behind the pan where nobody looks but the clerk.
- Bath and basin cleaned and disinfected, overflow and plughole included.
- Shower screen both sides, the tracks, and the sealant bead along the tray.
- Mirror and any cabinet, and behind it where it lifts off the wall.
- Extractor vent wiped, floor into the corners and behind the pedestal.
Bedrooms, living areas and the whole-property detail
- Inside every built-in wardrobe and cupboard, shelving wiped, skirting and any picture rail dusted down.
- All hard surfaces and fitted shelving in the living areas, with marks lifted off paintwork where they come away without taking the finish. A realistic line is drawn there, because nail holes and scuffs are a decorator’s bill, not something to scrub at.
- Hard floors vacuumed then washed, carpets vacuumed throughout and shampooed where the add-on is booked.
- Internal doors, frames, handles and light switches wiped, reachable cobwebs cleared from ceiling corners.
- Windows cleaned inside, frames and sills included.
Then the detail pass: sockets, radiators, trickle vents, the bin area, and the property left aired and free of any cleaning smell.
If the oven is the only thing your agent pulled you up on, standalone oven cleaning covers it on its own.
Where a tenancy writes in professional carpet cleaning as a condition, our carpet cleaning handles the hot-water extraction on the same visit.
What Affinity’s hard water does to a WD19 bathroom
Hard water is the quiet deduction nobody plans for.
- Supply
- Oxhey sits in Affinity Water‘s Watford supply, which comes off the chalk.
- Hardness
- About 226 mg/l calcium carbonate, roughly 15.8 Clark degrees, well up into the hard band and among the harder supplies in the country.
In practice:
- A shower screen in a WD19 bathroom can fog with mineral scale inside a single tenancy.
- Kettles fur up.
- Taps and the toilet pan grow a dull grey film a clerk will photograph without a second thought.
Wiping it does nothing. We descale it properly, with the right product and dwell time, so the deposit-costing haze actually leaves the glass instead of hiding in it until the light catches it side-on.
The clerk knows exactly where to look:
- a thumbnail down the tap
- the shower screen tilted against the light
- the showerhead pulled in close
Grout is the other one: the line between a pass and a deduction more often than carpets are.
We scrub it rather than wipe it, and where it is genuinely past saving, which happens on a long estate tenancy, we photograph the state before we start so nobody can bill you for wear that was already there at check-in. That dated photo has settled more disagreements than any argument ever has.
Wiping scale does nothing; the haze just hides in the glass until the clerk tilts it to the light.
Specialist floors sit outside the scrub-and-go work. Original boards in an old-Oxhey terrace, or the engineered board in a regeneration flat by the square, each want their own product, which is what the floor cleaning add-on is for.
Exterior glass an inventory sometimes asks for is a separate job too, folded into the same visit as window cleaning when it is on the list.
What it costs, and the sum nobody runs until it is too late
Flat pricing by property size, no survey needed for a standard let. Book by the hour instead at £30 per cleaner if the property is unusual or you only want part of it done, though for a hand-back clean the fixed price is usually the better deal and there is no clock to watch.
| Property | Typical duration | Estimated cost |
|---|---|---|
| Studio flat (South Oxhey Central, off Oxhey Drive) | 3-4 hours, 1 cleaner | From £156 |
| 1-bed flat | 4-5 hours, 1-2 cleaners | From £207 |
| 2-bed ex-LCC house or terrace | 5-6 hours, 2 cleaners | From £243 |
| 3-bed family house off Prestwick or Gosforth | 6-8 hours, 2 cleaners | From £339 |
| 4-bed house (Oxhey village, Hampermill Lane) | 8-10 hours, 2-3 cleaners | From £425 |
| Carpet shampoo add-on | Same visit | £29 a bedroom, £36 a living room |
| Oven-only clean | 1.5-2 hours | From £77 |
Carpets are charged on top because a bare-floor flat should not pay for shampooing it does not need. An oven added to the clean is priced on top too.
- Carpets
- £29 a bedroom, £36 for a living room, or £94 for two bedrooms and a living room done together, which is the option most ex-LCC family houses on the estate take.
- Oven cleaning, added to the clean
- £31 for a single and £62 for a double or a 90cm range.
A worked example
A two-bed ex-council house with carpets through both bedrooms and the lounge and a single oven comes to:
- £243 for the clean
- plus £94 for the whole-house carpet
- plus £31 for the oven
So £368, fixed, with the 48-hour re-clean guarantee behind it. We confirm the figure on the phone or by email before anyone is booked. No survey fee, no day-of surprises.
Run the sum the way the deposit makes you. A two-bed at £243 to protect several weeks of rent sitting in a scheme is not really a decision.
The guarantee is the point: if the clerk flags any cleanliness issue inside 48 hours we come back and put it right free, as long as you tell us in that window and nobody has moved in.
There is a reason the local agents know us. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across our patch, and over the years that work has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions.
That last number is really the whole job: money that stayed in the tenant’s account rather than the landlord’s.
Three jobs get muddled here, and it is worth booking the right one.
- Check-in inventory
- The report a clerk writes on day one describing every surface, with photos. It is the benchmark your check-out is judged against, which is why we clean to it and not to a general idea of tidy.
- End-of-tenancy clean
- Built to pass that inventory and release a deposit, done with the property empty, the 48-hour guarantee on it, priced by size.
- Deep clean
- A deep clean resets a home you are staying in, with no formal standard to hit, from £26 an hour per cleaner.
- Regular domestic clean
- A regular domestic clean is ongoing upkeep, from £23 an hour weekly or £24 fortnightly.
Why letting agents around here put us in front of tenants
We are not a national franchise routed through a call centre. We are a Hertfordshire-facing operation that has spent years on WD19 jobs specifically.
The agents covering these areas hand our number to their outgoing tenants because the cleans hold up at check-out and they are not the ones left fielding a deposit dispute:
- Oxhey
- South Oxhey
- Oxhey Hall
- Carpenders Park
It also means we know how the clerks the local agents instruct actually behave. The standard expected on an ex-LCC three-bed off Prestwick Road is real and it is detailed, and a clean built for somewhere softer-watered and newer does not pass first time on this estate.
Booking it, empty is best, and the licensing question
Booking is four steps.
- Ring 0333 555 2076 or email office@monstercleaning.com with your WD19 address, the property size and your check-out date.
- We give you a fixed price on the spot, carpets and oven added on if you want them, and the slot we can do. Allow a few days more for an end-of-month date.
- We clean to the 57-point checklist, ideally once the property is cleared so nothing gets re-marked between the clean and the inspection.
- If the clerk flags anything, tell us inside 48 hours and we come back and put it right at no charge.
Empty property is best. A clean done around boxes is one the clerk sees differently once the boxes are gone, and we will tell you plainly what we could not reach if furniture has to stay.
The licensing question
On licensing, since South Oxhey landlords ask:
- Mandatory HMO licence
- A house let to five or more people in two or more households, sharing a kitchen or bathroom, is a mandatory HMO and needs a licence from Three Rivers District Council.
- Additional licensing
- The council looked at an additional scheme for smaller HMOs and decided in June 2026 not to bring one in for now, and to review it again within a year.
- Article 4 direction
- Instead the council is preparing an Article 4 direction that would make converting a house to a small HMO need planning permission, consulted through mid-2026 and due to take effect in 2027 if confirmed.
- Carpenders Park
- It holds the biggest share of the district’s HMOs.
A clean handover protects the deposit whichever way that lands.
Questions we get asked
How much is end-of-tenancy cleaning in Oxhey?
A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed £425. Carpet shampoo and oven cleaning are charged on top, and we confirm the full figure before you book. There is no survey fee.
Is South Oxhey under Watford Borough Council or Three Rivers?
South Oxhey sits in Watford Rural parish under Three Rivers District Council, not Watford Borough Council, even though the address says Watford and the postcode is WD19. Oxhey village, north of the railway near Bushey station, is the part that falls under Watford Borough Council. We work both sides.
Does my Oxhey landlord need an HMO licence?
If the property is a house in multiple occupation with five or more people in two or more households sharing a kitchen or bathroom, it needs a mandatory licence from Three Rivers District Council in South Oxhey. In June 2026 the council decided against an additional scheme for smaller HMOs for now, to be reviewed within a year, and is preparing an Article 4 direction that would bring small HMOs under planning control from 2027 if confirmed. A clean handover protects the deposit either way.
Why is the scale so bad in WD19 bathrooms?
Oxhey is on Affinity Water’s Watford supply, which runs at about 226 mg/l calcium carbonate, roughly 15.8 Clark degrees, off the chalk and among the harder supplies in the country. Shower glass, taps and the toilet scale up fast over a tenancy, which is why descaling is built into every clean we do here rather than being an extra.
Do you guarantee the work?
Yes. If the inventory clerk flags something we missed, tell us within 48 hours and we return and re-clean it free under our 48-hour re-clean guarantee.
Should the property be empty when you clean?
Ideally yes. A clean done after everything is out is the one the clerk actually inspects. If furniture has to stay we clean around it and tell you plainly what we could not reach, so there are no surprises in the report.
How far in advance should I book?
A few days is usually enough, but end-of-month and end-of-quarter fill up, because that is when most WD19 tenancies end. The earlier you call with your check-out date, the better the chance of the slot you want.
Can you clean the carpets as well?
Yes. Carpet shampoo is £29 a bedroom, £36 a living room, or £94 for two bedrooms and a living room together. On the ex-LCC family houses on the estate the whole-house option is the usual one, and it clears the ground-in traffic wear clerks deduct for.
Do you clean the oven and extractor?
The oven is a priced add-on: £31 single, £62 double or a 90cm range. The extractor hood and its grease filter are in the standard clean. On the older galley kitchens around Hayling Road that filter is one of the first things a clerk checks.
What if I only have a small studio near the square?
A studio is £156, cleaned to the same 57-point checklist as a four-bed. The newer regeneration flats off Oxhey Drive are usually quick on everything except scale on the chrome, which we descale as part of the job.
Do you cover Oxhey village and Carpenders Park too?
Yes. We cover the older terraces and the larger houses along Oxhey Lane and Hampermill Lane in Oxhey village and Oxhey Hall, the streets around Carpenders Park station, and the whole South Oxhey estate. It is all WD19 and the surrounding postcodes and we are across all of it.
Who actually does the cleaning?
Our own trained cleaners, not a labour-agency crew that changes every visit. The same standard and the same checklist apply whether it is a regeneration flat by the square or a 1948 ex-council three-bed off Gosforth Lane.
How do I pay, and when?
We confirm the fixed price before the job. No survey fee, and the price we quote on the phone or by email is the price you pay.