A changeover is a reset, not a tidy-up
Owners ring me in June and ask whether I do changeovers. What they actually want to know is narrower: will the villa genuinely be ready before the next family walks in at four.
A week of strangers has to be erased in a few hours, to a standard the next set begins judging within ten minutes of dropping their bags. After more than ten years of villa cleaning in the Algarve, I treat a turnover as six stacked jobs: kitchen, bathrooms, beds and linen, floors, restock, walkthrough.
Leave one of them thin and the guest finds it. Maybe not on the first evening, but by Tuesday, when they open the cutlery drawer.
Where the time actually goes
I start in the kitchen, because that is where the last guests were least careful. They wipe the worktop. They rarely lift the toaster, and they almost never look inside the microwave.
Everything comes out of the fridge, including the half-jar of piri-piri. Shelves get washed rather than sprayed and smeared, and the rubber door seal gets wiped along its folds, where old spills go grey. Hob rings lift off, and the extractor filter above them needs degreasing far more often than owners expect.
Then the things guests open in the first hour. Crumbs out of the cutlery drawer. The kettle descaled, because hard water leaves a white rim that reads as neglect. Glassware held to the light for dishwasher film, which gets noticed the moment somebody pours wine on the terrace.
Bathrooms are quick to clean badly and slow to clean properly. The difference sits in the same few places every time: limescale on the screen and taps, which wants descaler and dwell time rather than muscle; hair pulled out of the drain rather than pushed down; grout at the foot of the screen; under the toilet seat and its hinges; and the extractor vent that fills with lint and stops shifting steam.
In the bedrooms, strip everything, protectors included. The mattress protector is the layer nobody changes and the one absorbing sun cream and sweat all summer. Check the bare mattress while you can see it, and vacuum under the bed, because sand travels further than anyone believes.
The order we work in
Most of it is quick in a fixed sequence, when nothing has to be revisited. If you would rather hand the rota over, it is the same work my team does week after week for owners around Vilamoura.
- Open the windows, note any damage, first linen load on before anything else.
- Kitchen: fridge, oven, extractor filter, kettle, drawers, glassware, bins washed and dried.
- Bathrooms: descale, drains, toilets, grout, vent, mirrors last, consumables restocked.
- Bedrooms: everything stripped, mattresses checked, beds made to one standard.
- Living areas: cushions lifted, remotes wiped, terrace doors and their sandy runners.
- Floors: vacuum edges and corners, then mop, working out towards the front door.
Floors go last for a reason beyond falling dust. Sand comes back: mop a hallway beautifully at ten, then carry linen through it three times. Around Quinta do Lago, the stretch between the pool and the kitchen does more work than any other floor in the building.
The last ten minutes
The final walkthrough is worth the three hours before it. I go through the house the way a guest will, front door to terrace, with nothing in my hands. Just looking.
Every light comes on. Rugs sit flat at the corners, and no bin bag stands by the door waiting to be forgotten. This is also where you catch the dripping tap and the wobbling toilet seat, which land in the same review as the cleaning. If a house is tired rather than dirty, that is a deep clean talking, and better heard in May than in August.
Tell me how many bedrooms and bathrooms you have and how tight your checkout-to-check-in window is. I will put a free quote together, with an honest word on whether that window is long enough.