Short-Let Damage Reports: What a Photo Inspection Should Cover After Every Guest
Written by Iva, founder of Iva Cleaning Services London. Damage in a short let is rarely dramatic. It is a…
Black spots along the silicone at the edge of the bath. A grey bloom in the grout above the shower. Speckles in the corner of the ceiling that come back a month after you wiped them off. Bathroom mould is the most common complaint we hear from London customers, and the reason it keeps returning is that most people treat the stain and not the cause.
Mould is a living organism. It needs three things: moisture, warmth and something to feed on. A bathroom provides all three every morning. Remove the moisture and the mould stops growing; remove the stain without removing the moisture and it is back within weeks. This guide covers both halves, the cleaning and the prevention, and explains what a professional treatment does that a bottle of spray cannot. It is written from what we see on deep bathroom cleaning visits across London, where mould and limescale usually arrive together.
A large share of the capital’s housing stock is Victorian and Edwardian terraces and conversions. Bathrooms were often added later into small internal rooms with no window, or into extensions with cold external walls. Add a shower that runs twice a day, a fan that was never wired to the light or has seized, and double glazing that seals the house tighter than it was designed to be, and you have a room that stays damp for hours after each use.
Mould spores are in the air everywhere. They only germinate on a surface that stays wet. The silicone sealant around a bath, the grout lines in a shower, the back of a toilet cistern against a cold wall, the top corners of the room where warm wet air collects and condenses: these are the places that stay wet longest, which is why they go black first.
Ventilate the room, wear gloves, and open a window if there is one. Then work by surface.
A household mould remover based on sodium hypochlorite (bleach) kills surface mould on non-porous tiles and bleaches the stain. Spray, leave for the time on the label, scrub grout with a stiff brush, rinse thoroughly. Never mix a chlorine product with an acid descaler or with anything containing ammonia; the combination releases toxic gas. If the grout is scaled as well as mouldy, descale first with vinegar or citric acid, rinse, let it dry, and only then use the mould product. Our guide to removing limescale covers that first step.
If the grout stays grey after treatment, the mould has gone into the pores and the only cosmetic fix is a grout pen or a regrout. Sealing grout after cleaning slows the next outbreak.
This is where most bathroom mould lives, and where most products fail. Mould grows into silicone, not just on it. A spray will lighten the surface and leave the roots. The method that works: lay strips of kitchen roll or cotton wool along the sealant, soak them in bleach-based mould remover, cover with cling film so they do not dry out, and leave overnight. Peel off, rinse, dry.
If the black remains after that, the sealant is finished. Cutting it out and resealing is a two-hour job with a £10 tube of anti-mould bathroom silicone, and it is the only permanent answer for sealant that has been black for a year or more. It is also something a landlord should expect to do between tenancies rather than ask a tenant to scrub.
Wash with a diluted fungicidal wash (sold for the purpose) or a mild bleach solution, rinse, and let it dry completely before repainting with a bathroom paint containing a fungicide. Painting over live mould with ordinary emulsion feeds it; it shows through again in a few weeks.
Fabric curtains and mats go through the washing machine at 60°C with a cup of white vinegar. Plastic curtains can be soaked in the bath with bleach solution. A mouldy roller blind is usually cheaper to replace than to clean.
Everything above removes what you can see. The following stops it returning, and matters more.
Tenants in England have a legal expectation that a home is fit to live in, and damp and mould caused by the building, by a broken extractor fan, by a leaking roof or by a cold-bridged wall, are the landlord’s responsibility to fix. Mould caused by not opening a window or drying washing on the radiators is generally treated as the occupier’s. In practice most cases are a mix. The practical advice is the same for both sides: keep dated photographs, report the problem in writing, and fix the ventilation before anyone argues about the stain.
At the end of a tenancy, black sealant and mouldy grout are two of the things an inventory clerk photographs first. If you are moving out, the deposit side of this is covered in end of tenancy clean vs deep clean, which explains what the check-out standard actually is.
A domestic spray lightens surface mould. A deep bathroom clean does four things a spray does not. It uses professional fungicidal products with longer contact times, applied by someone who knows which surfaces they are safe on. It treats the grout and sealant with the soak method rather than a wipe. It cleans the extractor fan grille and cover, which is usually clogged with the same mould and dust that stops it working. And it descales at the same time, because scale holds moisture against the surface and gives mould somewhere to anchor.
Our bathroom deep clean starts at £149 plus VAT for one bathroom and books about three hours. Mould and mildew treatment of grout and sealant is part of the standard visit. For a bathroom where mould has been left for a long time, there is a heavy surface mould treatment add-on at £39 plus VAT and an intensive grout clean at £49 plus VAT. What we cannot do is make dead sealant come back to life; where it needs replacing we will tell you rather than scrub at it for an hour. Customers who want the whole flat done usually pair it with our kitchen deep cleaning in London on the same day.
Kill the mould with a chlorine-based product on tiles and a soak on sealant. Replace sealant that stays black. Then run the fan, squeegee the screen, keep the room warm and the door open, and the bathroom stays clean. Mould is a moisture problem that shows up as a cleaning problem, and it is solved in that order.
Want the bathroom reset properly? Book online, pick a date and time, and we confirm within one working hour.
