Having the builders in… Again.

So, you know what the main issue is with home renovations that really annoys me? Having the builders in and spreading dust and dirt around the house like no bodies business. My partner and I are very much familiar with builders mess as we’ve done a lot of projects in our past but the same thing that is always a nuisance is cleaning up builders dust! When you’re having internal walls removed, so much dust and debris gets around the room and if it’s not vacuumed up it can very much linger for a long time if not, forever.

I say this with a love/hate relationship, don’t get me wrong, I love what builders do, they are masters of their trades (most of them!!) but they don’t really clean up after themselves and I think this is very important, especially if you want to live in a dust free environment that’s for sure. So back to my story…

It was very recently when we had an internal wall which separated two big double bedrooms removed to create a nice huge bedroom with en-suite that I decided to find out what the best vacuum for builders dust was and just go ahead and bought one whilst we were having the works done in our home and I don’t joke when I say this, but this was the best thing I’ve ever done and should have gone ahead and bought one for our previous jobs, I ended up buying a Numatic Henry XTRA which is a fantastic vacuum cleaner, it’s bigger and more powerful than the standard Henry and for around £40 more in price but I tell you what, after each evening after the builders had gone for the day, I waited a little while to allow the dust to settle on the surfaces and then I was straight in that room with a mask, vacuuming up all that disgusting builders dust.

The amount of footprints on my floor was unbelievable but I had the flooring completely ripped out as we were going for a nice cream carpet, can you imagine have a builders dirty footprint on cream/ivory carpet! I think not, the carpet was definitely the last thing to be fitted. I can not honestly emphasis how important it was to vacuum the wood under-floors each day, we’re appreciating it more so now once everything has been completed, the amounts of dust we kept on seeing in our old properties which would seem to come from no-where and sit on the skirting boards every single day and that was with me cleaning/dusting and vacuuming 5 times per week was crazy, this has been eliminated now and I finally know why, I even spoke to one of the builders who was doing the job here and he said not often do clients realise that they should be keeping the area as dust free as possible and that a builder is there to do one thing, “BUILD” not “CLEAN”. When he said this to me I thought “Blooody cheek” of the man but he has got a point.

After that conversation, I thought, never am I going to just leave the builders to get on with it, I will be forever cleaning the surfaces and floors even if the ground is as mucky as a pigs trough. Trust me, you’ll thank me for it later. It’s all in the PREP!