How To Get Your Home Guest-ready If You Have Toddlers Roaming About
I once arrived at a house on Northcote Road in Battersea two hours before the client’s in-laws were due, to find her on her knees sorting a Duplo pile into colour groups while a bin bag of nappies sat in the hall and the downstairs loo had a fortnight of misfires down the side of the pedestal. She had spent forty minutes on the Duplo. Nobody who walked through that door was going to look at the Duplo.
That is the whole problem with getting a house guest-ready when small children live in it. The mess that bothers you and the mess that registers with a visitor are two separate lists, and parents work off the wrong one under time pressure.
What Do Guests Notice In The First Ninety Seconds?
Smell, then the floor, then whatever they touch on the way in. In that order, and it is not close.
A visitor forms a judgement about a house before their coat is off, and they form it in the hall, which in most London flats is the narrowest and least ventilated part of the property and sits next to the shoe pile, the buggy and the nappy bin. Toys scattered across a sitting room read as evidence that children live there. A sour smell in an entrance corridor reads as something else entirely, and people are far too polite to mention it.
The second thing is the floor, and specifically the floor at the edges. Grown adults track dirt into the middle of a room. Toddlers deposit food, sand, raisins and dried milk along the skirting boards, under the radiator, and in the corner behind the door where the hoover never reaches.
Why does the hallway carry so much of the weight?
Because it sets the frame for everything after it. A client in Stoke Newington used to keep an unlidded nappy bin under the coat rail at the bottom of the stairs, three feet from the front door, and she could no longer smell it after six months of living with it. Nose fatigue is real and it happens to everybody. You stop registering your own house within about a week.
The test is to go out for twenty minutes and come back in through your own front door with your coat still on. Whatever hits you in the first three seconds is what your guests will get.
Where Is The Smell Coming From?
Almost always protein. Milk, vomit, urine, and the biological soup that lives in the weave of upholstery after a toddler has been on it for a year.
Standard household detergents lift grease and shift dirt while doing very little to proteins, which is why a sofa cushion can look clean and still smell faintly of yoghurt in a warm room. Protein soils need enzymes. Buy a proper enzyme cleaner, or use bio laundry liquid diluted heavily in warm water, which is the same chemistry at a fraction of the price. Give it dwell time. Ten minutes minimum, because enzymes work slowly and a spray-and-wipe defeats the point.
Heat is the enemy here. Steam cleaners and hot water set protein into fibres the same way they set egg onto a pan, so anything involving milk or sick gets cool water and patience.
The car seat and the buggy footmuff are outside the scope of a guest tidy and I mention them only because they come into the hall.
Have you smelled the high chair straps?
Nobody cleans the straps. The tray gets wiped after every meal and the five-point harness gets ignored for months, and the webbing has yoghurt and dried formula worked deep into it. It is the single most common source of a sour note in a London kitchen and it takes an hour to fix.
Most harnesses unthread from the back of the seat. Soak them in an enzyme solution, work the buckle with an old toothbrush, rinse, hang them over a radiator overnight. While they are out, the seat crevices come apart with a butter knife wrapped in a cloth.
What Is The Toddler Tide Line?
There is a horizontal band around every room in a house with a small child in it, running from roughly forty centimetres off the floor up to about ninety, where everything is touched by hands carrying food. Door frames, the lower half of the fridge, banister spindles, light switches and the whole span of wall along the hallway. Above and below that band, the house is normal. Inside it, there is a film.
You cannot see it head-on. Stand at one end of a corridor with a window at your back and look along the wall at a shallow angle, and it appears as an uneven greasy sheen at hip height, dotted with individual prints. Once seen it cannot be unseen, and it is the thing that makes an otherwise tidy house feel grubby without anybody being able to say why.
The fix is a bucket of warm water with a small amount of washing-up liquid, a microfibre wrung out hard, and fifteen minutes walking the perimeter of the ground floor at that height. Change the water when it greys. The switch plates get done with a cloth barely damp, and the rest of the wall above shoulder height can stay exactly as it is. Leave it. On matt emulsion, which is on the walls of most rented flats across Wanstead and Willesden, work gently and do not scrub, because matt paint burnishes and you will leave a shiny patch that looks worse than the marks did. Satin and eggshell take a proper wipe.
Skirting boards get done at the same time, since you are already down there and the cloth is already out.
What should you keep chemicals away from?
Screens. The television, tablets and the glass on a wall-mounted oven door all end up with prints on them, and the household glass sprays that clear them fastest are the ones that will wreck an anti-glare coating. Alcohol and ammonia strip the coating on television panels permanently and there is no way back from it. Damp microfibre, buffed dry with a second one, and nothing else.
Stainless fridge doors take a smear of olive oil on a cloth after cleaning, which fills the brushed grain and stops prints showing for a fortnight. That one is a trick from a chef I cleaned for on Chatsworth Road in Clapton and it works better than any dedicated stainless product I have bought.
How Much Of The Toy Situation Should You Deal With?
Less than you think. Toys in a house with a two-year-old function as furniture, and every visitor who has ever had a child grasps that within a second of arriving. Sorting them is where guest-prep time goes to die.
One basket per room. Sweep everything into it without categorising anything, put the basket in a corner, and move on. Sorting can happen on Sunday or never. Leave it.
The playroom, if you have one, gets the door shut. I have said this to clients on Lordship Lane in East Dulwich and had them look at me as though I had suggested something disgraceful, and then had them thank me afterwards, because two hours of tidying a room nobody entered is two hours nobody gets back.
Which rooms earn the effort?
The loo is the one that matters, and in a house with a toddler in the potty-training window it needs more than a wipe of the seat. Urine goes down the side of the pan, onto the pedestal base, along the skirting behind it and into the grout at the foot of the tile. That is where the ammonia smell lives, and it survives every cleaning of the bowl itself.
Enzyme cleaner, floor level, all round the base, ten minutes, then rinse. Do the underside of the seat hinges. Hand towel replaced with a clean one, because the one hanging there has been used by a child with paint on his hands.
Then the room your guests will sit in. Crumbs out of the sofa crevice with the crevice tool, arms of the sofa wiped where the grease sits, cushion covers turned over rather than washed. The throw that has been on the back of the armchair since Christmas goes into a cupboard, unwashed, and comes out again on Monday. Leave it.
What Does The Last Hour Before The Doorbell Look Like?
Hall first: bin bag out, shoes into a box, floor mopped along the edges. Then the loo, then the tide line in whatever rooms people will walk through, then a basket sweep, then windows open for ten minutes even in February, because ventilation does more for the way a house smells than any plug-in ever manufactured.
What does not happen in that hour is anything involving strong chemicals at toddler height, and this is the part I care about most. The morning guests arrive is when bleach bottles get left on bathroom floors, safety gates get propped open for the mop, and socket covers come out and stay out. More small-child accidents happen during a rushed pre-visitor clean than during any ordinary week, and a slightly grubby skirting board has never hurt anybody.
Which brings me to the thing I tell clients that costs me work. Do not book a deep clean for the day before visitors arrive. Book it for the week after they leave, when the house is at its worst, the children are back at nursery, and somebody has four uninterrupted hours to strip the high chair and get behind the radiator in the hall. A professional clean on a Friday evening with three toddlers in the house is an expensive way to move mess from one room to another.
What is worth doing the night before instead?
One load of washing, so there are clean hand towels and a clean tea towel, which is the pair of items most likely to let a kitchen down. The bins, all of them, including the nappy bin liner and the small one in the bathroom. A quick pass of the guest bed if there is one, since a mattress protector in a spare room in a family house has usually had a child sleep on it at some point and nobody remembers when.
Then stop. Sleep is worth more than a mopped kitchen floor, and a parent running on five hours makes a worse host than a slightly dusty skirting board makes an impression.
The Duplo in Battersea is still, as far as I know, unsorted.