Window and Skylight Cleaning — St Helen's Road, Hawthorn East

Skylights on a tile roof are the most neglected glass on any house, and the material is why. On sheet metal you can walk out to a unit and clean it standing beside it. Terracotta will not take that: the tiles crack under a boot and a cracked tile is a leak. So they have to be reached from the perimeter, and most cleaners simply leave them.

The glazing was done first from ground level, then the skylights from ladders and poles at the roof edge, with nobody standing on the tiles. Reaching across is slower than walking up, and it is the reason these units had gone so long. The advantage of a repeat visit is that none of that had to be worked out on the day — the access was already known from the gutter clean two months earlier.

• Windows cleaned inside and outside
• Frames, sills and tracks done with the glazing
• Skylights reached from the roof edge, not from the tiles
• No foot traffic on the terracotta
• Glass checked dry before leaving
• Before and after photographs supplied

• Skylights cleaned for the first time in years
• No cracked or displaced tiles
• Windows finished on both faces, frames included
• Third job for the same household inside a year