House rules
The original 1912 pine floor is why shoes come off on the parlour floor — the same floor the changeover cleans, once, before the next stay ever sees it.
Cleaning and the changeover
Eleven o'clock out and three o'clock in is four hours, and a whole-house changeover uses all of them.
Where the cleaning fee actually goes
For an apartment, the same person works through the same sequence every time: strip and remake the beds, clean the bathroom, clean the kitchen, clean the floors throughout, and confirm that the door code has rolled over to the next stay's code before leaving. None of that is optional and none of it can be skipped to save time, which is the whole reason it is a fee rather than something folded silently into the nightly rate.
For the whole house it is the same list, three times over — three kitchens' worth of surfaces if you count the second kitchen, three bathrooms, every bedroom in the building — done in parallel by two cleaners rather than doubled in sequence by one, because the window to do it in does not get any longer just because there is more building in it.
The numbers, by unit
How long it actually takes
- An apartment
- Between two and three hours, by one cleaner. Linen out, bathroom, kitchen, floors, and the check that the code has rolled.
- The whole house
- Four hours by two cleaners, which is why a whole-house departure cannot be late and a whole-house arrival cannot be early.
- After an event
- The clear-down night exists because an event finishing at eleven cannot be cleaned before a three o'clock arrival the next day. It is not an upsell; it is the arithmetic.
- Mid-stay
- On a stay of seven nights or more the linen is changed once, by arrangement, on a day you choose. Under seven nights nobody comes in at all.
Why a whole-house departure cannot be late
The window between the check-out time and the check-in time is four hours, and a whole-house changeover by two cleaners uses every one of them. There is no slack built into that: a departure that runs even twenty minutes late is not made up somewhere else in the day, because there is no somewhere else — the window is exactly as long as the job takes, not longer than it. That is also why a whole-house arrival cannot be early. The same arithmetic runs in the other direction, and it runs the same way regardless of which end of the stay is asking for the exception.
The clear-down night exists because an event finishing at eleven cannot be cleaned before a three o'clock arrival the next day. It is not an upsell; it is the arithmetic.
See also
The pages this one connects to
Deposits and cancellations
The refundable hold exists for exactly three things a changeover clean cannot fix: the floor, the plaster cornice, and the original sash frames.
Check the dates you want
The calendar is live. It shows what is free, it will not sell the same night twice, and it prints the whole total — cleaning fee included — before it asks for a name.