Walk into a fit-out the week the trades leave and you can taste it. Gypsum sits on the back of your throat, everything horizontal carries a fine grey film, and the glass has that dull bloom that makes a brand new office look second hand. The lights are on, the joinery is in, the place is finished, and it looks wrong.
Getting from that room to the room in the architect’s visuals is three separate jobs, priced separately, booked at different points, and routinely confused with one another by everyone involved. The confusion is where the money goes missing. A tenant assumes the fit-out price included the finished article. The main contractor assumed the tenant was handling the last stage. Somebody ends up paying twice, and quite often it is the client.
What are the three cleans, and which one are you paying for?
The builders’ clean, sometimes called the rough clean or first clean, happens while the site is still a site. It is heavy work: debris and packaging out, plaster and screed splashes off, sheeting lifted, high-level dust knocked down, floors scraped and swept. It is usually carried out by the main contractor’s own operatives and priced into the construction contract.
The sparkle clean is the detailed one. All trades off site, the building empty, and a team working top down through every surface: glass and frames, ironmongery, ceiling grid, light diffusers, skirtings, sanitaryware, floor finishes brought up to their intended appearance. This is the clean that produces the visuals.
The snagging clean, or touch-up clean, comes after the snagging works. Joiners, decorators and electricians return to put right whatever the client marked up at inspection, and they bring their own mess with them.
Where Cat A ends and Cat B begins
London fit-outs run in two stages and the cleaning follows the split. Cat A is the landlord’s base build: raised floor, suspended ceiling, mechanical and electrical services, basic finishes. Cat B is the tenant’s fit-out, which puts partitions, joinery, kitchens and meeting rooms into that shell.
Which means most floors get cleaned, then have holes cut in the ceiling and partitions built through them, then get cleaned again. A landlord handing over a Cat A floor has usually paid for a sparkle clean, and that clean is worth very little to the incoming tenant, because the Cat B works will undo it within a fortnight.
Tenants pay for a Cat A sparkle clean in their rent and then pay for a Cat B one out of their fit-out budget. It looks like duplication and it is not.
Why can’t it all be done in one go at the end?
Because dust falls, and it keeps falling for days after the work that made it has stopped.
Dust falls slowly. Fine gypsum and screed stays suspended in still air for a long time and gets disturbed again by every door opening and every trolley wheeled across the floor. Clean a partition on Tuesday while a first-fix electrician is drilling above the ceiling grid and you have cleaned nothing. The material relocates onto the surface you have just finished.
There is a second reason, and it is about what dust does to finishes. Cement and plaster residue left on glass and polished stone for weeks is alkaline and abrasive, and it etches. Screed splash left on new vinyl hardens into something that then needs a scraper, and a scraper on new vinyl is a decision nobody wants to make. The rough clean exists to get contaminating material off surfaces early, before it becomes damage.
The dust in the ceiling void and the floor void
Two spaces on every London fit-out go uncleaned as a matter of routine.
Above the ceiling grid, on top of the tiles and along the cable trays, there is whatever the construction left behind. Nobody sees it. It stays there for the length of the lease, feeding into the return air path, and it turns up years later on a dilapidations schedule or during the next strip-out when someone lifts a tile and a decade’s worth of construction dust comes down on the desks.
Below, the raised floor void collects offcuts, screws, cable ties, sandwich wrappers and a startling depth of fines. Floor tiles get lifted for a data pull three years on and the void is filthy, which matters because the void on many buildings is part of the air distribution route. Ask for both voids to be included in the sparkle clean specification. They almost never are unless somebody names them.
What separates a sparkle clean from a wipe round?
The specification, and whether anyone reads it with a torch afterwards.
A proper sparkle clean works top down through the whole volume. Ceiling grid faces and tile edges, light diffusers inside and out, ductwork grilles, and the tops of partitions and door frames where the last of the airborne dust lands. Then vertical surfaces, glass, ironmongery, switch plates. Then joinery, including the inside of every cupboard and drawer, which trades treat as somewhere to leave things. Then sanitaryware, with labels and protective film removed and adhesive residue taken off rather than left as a grey smear. Then floors, last, with the right treatment for the finish.
Silicone smears on glass, plaster in the track of a sliding door, paint speckle on ironmongery, labels still on the taps: those four failures account for most of the snagging items a cleaning contractor gets marked up on.
The glass is where fit-out cleans get ruined
More glazing is damaged during fit-out cleaning than at any other point in a building’s life, and once it is damaged the only remedy is replacement.
Cement and plaster splash on glass bonds and etches. If it is left long enough, the mark is in the glass rather than on it. The temptation at that point is a blade, and blades on modern glazing are how you turn a stain into a permanent scratch pattern. Coated glass, low-emissivity units and anything with an applied film will not tolerate scraping at all, and a lot of London glazing is coated in some way the cleaning operative cannot see.
The answer is chemical rather than mechanical, applied early, before the splash cures. Which means the rough clean matters more than anyone gives it credit for, and a fit-out contractor who skimps on it is storing up a glazing replacement bill for somebody.
Manifestation film applied over glass that has not been properly cleaned is its own small disaster. The dust is now permanently under the film.
When should each clean be booked, and what goes wrong with the dates?
Rough clean while the works run, with at least one pass after first fix and one after the messy wet trades. Sparkle clean once every trade is off site and no further construction work is planned, which is later than the programme claims and needs a day or two of settling time after the last activity. Snagging clean after snagging is signed off, and before furniture arrives if you can manage it.
What goes wrong is the programme. Fit-out programmes slip at the front and never at the back, because the client’s move-in date is fixed by a lease expiry somewhere else. The compression lands on the last fortnight, which is where the cleaning sits.
So the sparkle clean gets booked for Thursday, a joiner comes back on Friday to hang a door that arrived late, and the desks land on Monday morning on top of a floor that has sawdust on it.
The snagging clean nobody budgeted for
Of the three, the snagging clean is the one that goes unfunded most often, because it appears on nobody’s original scope. The construction contract covers the builders’ clean. The fit-out budget covers the sparkle clean. Then snagging generates a fresh round of drilling and painting, and the office picks up a new coat of fine dust in the week before the staff arrive.
Put a figure in the budget for it at the start. Something in the region of a fifth of the sparkle clean cost, held back and spent at the end, saves the argument about who pays for it in the week everyone is at their worst.
Furniture install is the same story: cardboard, protective film and the dust off a hundred boxes, all landing after the clean that was meant to be final.
Does every fit-out need all three?
No, and I turn down work on this basis several times a year.
On a small Cat B job, say a floor under 5,000 square feet with light partitioning and no wet trades, one properly resourced clean after the trades leave, plus a touch-up before occupation, is sufficient. Selling a three-stage programme on a job that size is selling stages. The point of the sequence is to manage dust generated over weeks by multiple trades, and a small refit does not generate it.
What I will not do is a sparkle clean on a site that still has trades working. The client pays for a finish that is undone within a day, then pays somebody again the following week. If your programme has slipped, move the clean and move the furniture delivery, and if the furniture cannot move, accept that you are buying a rough clean and a touch-up rather than a sparkle.
What happened off Featherstone Street
A tenant took a fifth floor off Featherstone Street, EC1V, last spring, 9,000 square feet, Cat B with a decent joinery package and a coffee bar. The programme lost eleven days to a switchgear delivery and the move-in date could not shift.
We were booked for the sparkle on a Wednesday with the client’s staff arriving the following Monday. On the Tuesday I walked the floor and there were two decorators still on the meeting rooms and a shopfitter waiting on a glass panel. Doing the clean as booked would have been theatre.
What we did was a heavy second rough clean on the Wednesday, the sparkle on the Saturday once the shopfitter had finished, and a two-person touch-up on the Sunday evening after the furniture install. It cost about fourteen per cent more than the original quote and was the cheapest version available by then.
Dust falls for three days after the last drill goes quiet. Everything in the programme has to be arranged around that, or it gets arranged around it anyway, at the client’s expense.
