After builders cleaning in Bexley

Bexley allows noisy building work from 8am to 6pm on weekdays and 8am to 1pm on Saturdays, with none on Sundays or bank holidays. A site working outside those hours gets a visit first and can then be served a legal notice; ignoring it ends in court. For large or long projects the environmental protection team asks for Section 61 prior consent under the Control of Pollution Act 1974, with a draft about six weeks ahead and the formal application at least 28 days before work starts.

Book the clean for after the last dusty trade, which on most house jobs is the plasterer or the floor sander. Fine dust keeps settling for hours after the work stops; the page on getting plaster dust out of a home explains why the crew dusts every room more than once.

Bexley has two free reuse and recycling centres, Foots Cray on Maidstone Road (DA14 5HS) and Thames Road in Crayford (DA1 5QJ). Residents arriving by car with proof of address need no booking, and both take soil and rubble, plasterboard, wood and dried water-based paint. Both refuse vans, oil-based paint and any waste produced by contractors working in a resident's home.

A resident with a van goes to the Thames Road transfer station, where 250 kg of household waste a year is free; the allowance was cut from 500 kg on 1 September 2023. Businesses pay by weight and need a waste carrier's licence: hardcore construction waste costs £116 a tonne, with a £19 minimum per 100 kg. The council's paid bulky collection lists DIY waste among the things it takes from outside a home, though it will not collect large amounts of rubble or anything from inside the house, and it takes household waste only, not waste from a business such as a builder's.

The builder clears the site, then the crew comes; it does not take rubble, offcuts, old units or paint tins away.

The council's Local Character Study says Bexley's population doubled from 100,000 in 1931 to 200,000 in 1941 as interwar estates spread over the higher ground, and that most of it is still built at two storeys.

On those streets the usual building job is a dormer loft, a kitchen extension or a bathroom refit in a 1930s semi. In Barnehurst three-quarters of the homes in the Council Tax records date from 1919 to 1939. A semi made into a 4-bed by a loft conversion usually takes 3 cleaners for 4 hours, £392 all in, and a 3-bed after a full renovation 3 cleaners for 5 hours, £482; on bigger houses the crew grows more than the hours do.

New homes are going up on the river side. The London Plan puts two opportunity areas wholly or partly in the borough: Bexley Riverside, covering Belvedere, Erith, Slade Green and Crayford, with capacity for 6,000 homes and 19,000 jobs, and Thamesmead and Abbey Wood, shared with Greenwich, with 8,000 homes across the two boroughs. The borough's target is 6,850 homes for 2019/20 to 2028/29, then 685 a year under the Local Plan adopted in April 2023. That plan allocates about 1,850 homes on the Lesnes Estate and Coralline Walk in Abbey Wood, replacing 746, and at least 740 at Crabtree Manorway South in Belvedere. New flats in Erith and Crayford mean handover cleans: dust inside every cupboard, sealant smears in the bathroom and labels and paint flecks on new windows. The full price list has every size of home.