After builders cleaning in Wandsworth

Wandsworth lets builders make noise that carries past the site boundary from 8am to 6pm on weekdays and from 8am to 1pm on Saturdays. Outside those hours it is special cases only. So the last sanding, cutting and drilling on a house happens inside that window, and the clean goes in after it.

Book the crew for the day after the dust-making work stops. Fine plaster dust keeps falling out of the air for hours, which is why the crew dusts top to bottom more than once. About a week's notice is usually enough; Fridays and Saturdays go first.

If the worktop fitter or the decorator's snagging visit is still to come, put the clean after it: one return visit with a saw undoes a day of dusting.

Nothing from the build leaves with the crew, and the council's own routes refuse most of it.

Wandsworth's paid DIY collection, for residents only, costs £106.70 for up to four items and £22.60 for each extra one. It takes a fitted bath, sinks, toilets, old kitchen units, doors and sacks of DIY waste that residents took out themselves, but turns down rubble, plasterboard, tiles, cement and anything left by contractors working in the home. The Smugglers Way household waste and recycling centre accepts small amounts of a resident's own DIY waste free by car. A resident with a booked van can bring 100 litres or one large item once every 7 days, and anything over that costs £286.70 a tonne with a £154.82 minimum. The free Mega Skip Days turn away plasterboard, paint, concrete and asbestos.

So write rubble and plasterboard into the builder's price. Once the rooms are clear, the crew deals with what is left: the fine dust on every ledge (construction dust cleaning), paint spots on the floor and the film on new tiles, lifted where they will come off.

Wandsworth has 46 conservation areas, from single streets such as Deodar Road to the whole of West Putney. In eight of them an Article 4(2) direction limits changes to the outside of houses: Dover House Estate, Heaver Estate, Latchmere Estate, Putney Lower Common, Roehampton Village, Shaftesbury Park Estate, Totterdown Fields Estate and Wandsworth Common. Those houses tend to keep their sashes and coloured glass, so the crew lifts paint from old glass only where it comes away cleanly and says on the day what will not. On the cottage streets of Totterdown Fields in Tooting (SW17), the Shaftesbury Park houses in Battersea, the Heaver Estate in Balham (SW12) and round Putney Lower Common in Putney, that care takes much of the day.

At the other end of the stock is new building. The London Plan gives the Vauxhall Nine Elms Battersea Opportunity Area, which Wandsworth shares with Lambeth, capacity for 18,500 homes, and Clapham Junction 2,500 more. Permission for 1,791 homes on the York Road and Winstanley estates came in August 2023, and for 662 at the Ram Quarter in April 2024. A new flat needs labels off the glazing, grout haze and silicone smears on wall tiles lifted where they will come off, and the dust taken out of every kitchen unit.