After builders cleaning in Eltham, SE9

Well Hall's Progress Estate went up in 1915, built in roughly ten months by the Office of Works so that Arsenal munitions workers had somewhere to live. Its two-storey houses look like cottages and sit in a garden-suburb layout. Royal Greenwich designated it in 1971, and under an Article 4 direction approved in 1974 most changes to the outside need permission. The grounds of Eltham Palace, whose great hall dates from the 1470s, and Well Hall Pleasaunce are conservation areas too, both within 800 metres of the middle of Eltham Town & Avery Hill ward, and 44 listed buildings stand inside that radius, six of them Grade I.

Owners in these streets refit kitchens and bathrooms and keep the old doors and joinery. Plaster dust lodges in panel mouldings and along the top of every door frame, and the crew wipes those by hand with a damp cloth. If your home has original glass, tiles or boards, mention them when you send photos so the crew brings products that suit them.

If you are living in the house, the clean still waits until the last trade has finished in every room, the loft included. The crew will not work round a plasterer or a carpenter, because the dust comes straight back. About a week's notice is usually enough; Fridays and weekends go first.

The crew does not move personal belongings, food or crockery, so box up or cover what is in the rooms before the works start, and empty the kitchen cupboards you want cleaned inside. Carpets are vacuumed as standard. Carpet cleaning after building work is an add-on, a bedroom at £36, and the page on construction dust cleaning explains why fine dust needs more than one pass.

Eltham sits between Kidbrooke to the north-west, Mottingham to the south and Blackfen over the Bexley border to the east. The page on the rest of Greenwich has the council's skip, scaffold and tip rules, and what a builders clean costs lists every size of home.