Cleaning Services Cost Adelaide SA 2026 - Complete Pricing Guide

Cleaning Costs Across Metropolitan Adelaide for 2026

Adelaide is a compact capital and that shows up in a quote as choice more than as travel. The metropolitan area runs roughly seventy kilometres from Gawler down to Sellicks Beach and is rarely more than twenty wide, hemmed by the gulf on one side and the Mount Lofty Ranges on the other. An operator based in Mile End can reach most of the city inside half an hour, which keeps travel components small and keeps competition genuine in a way it is not in a long thin city. Minimum job values still apply at the northern and southern ends, and the rural fringe beyond Gawler and Aldinga is where travel starts to appear on an invoice.

An independent operator works at $42 to $78 an hour inside and $80 to $118 for a two person team. Figure $130 to $240 on a regular three bedroom clean, $95 to $180 on a two bedroom apartment and $340 to $730 on a one-off deep clean. Those figures sit under Sydney and Melbourne and a little under Perth, and the per hour rate on a regular booking is lower than on a one-off because the operator is buying predictability.

The local lines are where the figures stop resembling other capitals. Shower and tapware scale restoration at $120 to $340 exists because the water leaves mineral deposit faster than a weekly wipe removes it. The stone premium at $360 to $850 exists because a large share of inner Adelaide is nineteenth century bluestone and sandstone. Concrete and paver cleaning at $220 to $520 and house washing at $340 to $920 both carry the same complication, because the method that suits brick veneer will damage a soft stone face.

Property type splits the figures further again, and sharply enough to matter. A city apartment has narrow scope, easy access and a strata protocol. A Norwood bluestone villa has wide scope, original interiors and possible salt damp at the base of the walls. A Blakeview house on a new estate block has modern surfaces, easy access and construction dust. Each of the three gets quoted on entirely different grounds, so a single Adelaide average tells a householder very little. Set against the wider South Australian cleaning services picture, the metropolitan area is the best supplied part of the state and the most varied by building type.

Every specialist trade is well supplied right across the city. Carpet cleaning has operators covering every suburb, and so does oven cleaning, which leaves a householder with real choice for most of the year, which a thinner market would never give them.

That depth of supply thins as soon as the ground rises. The field of operators willing to come up the escarpment is smaller, and the ones who do come carry different equipment. The Adelaide Hills draw on a smaller pool of operators and add canopy, slope and a fire season to the same interior scope, which is why hills exterior work prices above the equivalent job on the plain.

What Cleaning Costs in Adelaide

Interior pricing here is ordinary, and saying so plainly comes before the local complications. An independent operator charges $42 to $78 an hour and a two person team $80 to $118. For 2026 that gives $130 to $240 on a regular three bedroom clean, $95 to $180 on a two bedroom apartment and $175 to $310 on a four bedroom two bathroom house. A one-off deep clean on a three bedroom property is $340 to $730, and the figure follows how long it has been since the last proper one more closely than it follows floor area.

Vacate work sits above all of that at $450 to $950 for a three to four bedroom house and $285 to $520 for a two bedroom apartment, because the scope is wider and the standard is written down. End of lease cleaning as standard takes in the oven and rangehood, every wet area, internal glass and tracks, skirtings, light fittings and the inside of all the cupboards. Two lines turn up on Adelaide invoices that a Brisbane or Darwin household would not recognise. Scale restoration on a shower and its tapware at $120 to $340 is the common one, and it exists because the water here leaves mineral deposit faster than a weekly wipe removes it. The second is the stone premium, a question of fabric before it is one of postcode. A clean on a bluestone or sandstone cottage with original joinery, deep skirtings and a tiled hall takes materially longer than the same floor area in brick veneer, and where salt damp is active at the base of the walls the method changes as well as the time.

The seasonal pattern is a dry summer and a cool wet winter, the reverse of the tropics and much like Melbourne. Carpet dries fast from November through March and slowly in July, so a winter extraction wants the heating on and the house shut. The tightest weeks are not summer in general but the Festival and Fringe stretch through late February and March, when inner suburban short stay turnover competes with households for the same operators.

Hard Water, Scale and the Shower

This is the Adelaide cleaning problem that nobody warns a new arrival about. SA Water defines hardness as the sum of calcium and magnesium shown as a calcium carbonate equivalent, and says that more than 200 milligrams a litre is considered hard water. It also makes the structural point: hardness is more likely where a supply leans mainly on groundwater systems, and it can lead to scaling problems on appliances and taps. Adelaide draws on a mix of reservoirs, the River Murray and groundwater depending on the system and the season, so the figure is not one number for the whole city and it repays looking up before anybody assumes.

There is a genuinely useful tool sitting behind that threshold, and almost nobody uses it. SA Water publishes a drinking water profile for an individual address, giving the mineral make-up of the supply that actually reaches the property, and it expresses hardness in English, French and German degrees as well as milligrams a litre. That sounds like trivia until you go to set up a dishwasher, because European appliances ask for hardness in those degrees and the installer rarely knows the local figure. What hardness does is visible, cumulative and a cleaning problem; nothing about it is a health one. A chalky film settles on shower screens and glass, a crust forms round tap spouts and shower roses, kettles and coffee machines fur internally, and a dark ring sets at the waterline in toilets and basins. None of it responds to a general purpose spray, because the deposit is mineral and the spray is built for grease and soap film.

The practical answer is an acidic descaler used on the surfaces that need it and rinsed off, alongside a neutral cream cleaner for everyday work. CLR, which stands for calcium lime rust, is the commonest of them on an Australian shelf and is carried by Bunnings, Mitre 10 and the supermarkets. Keep acid away from natural stone, the unglazed tessellated tile in a heritage hall and any stone benchtop, all of which it etches permanently. Where a shower has years of build-up, scale restoration at $120 to $340 is better value than a general clean trying to absorb it, and tile and grout cleaning deals with the grout lines separately.

Salt Damp at the Base of a Stone Wall

More Adelaide houses have this than their owners realise, and cleaning is where it most often gets worse. The authoritative document is the technical guide to salt attack and rising damp in historic buildings, produced jointly by the South Australian heritage agency, Adelaide City Council and the heritage bodies of two other states. It states that Adelaide is well known for its bad salt damp, and gives the reason: hot drying summers combined with very salty soils, against a comparison with Sydney where a more humid climate and lower salt levels produce slower decay. The combination is close to a worst case, and inner Adelaide is full of the masonry that suffers from it.

The mechanism is simple enough to picture once somebody explains it. Moisture rises through porous masonry by capillary action, the same wicking that draws water up a dry towel, carrying dissolved salt out of the soil and the mortar. The guide puts the normal exterior height limit for rising damp in Australia at 1.0 to 1.5 metres above ground level, with the evaporative zone commonly between 0.5 and 1.2 metres. Water evaporates from the wall surface, the salt it carried cannot, and so the salt concentrates and crystallises.

Where it crystallises decides whether you have a cosmetic problem or a structural one. Slow evaporation puts the crystals on the surface as efflorescence, which the guide describes as a relatively harmless white powder. Fast evaporation pushes crystallisation inside the wall as subflorescence, and there the guide is blunt: the force exerted by rapidly crystallising salt is very high and sufficient to disrupt even the strongest masonry. That is what produces fretting, where the face of the stone crumbles away, along with the loss of surface skins off stone and soft brick.

For a householder the test is what the wall is doing and not what colour it is. A white bloom that dusts off is efflorescence and is not urgent. Stone or brick that is breaking up, shedding its face or going powdery to the touch is subflorescence, and no amount of cleaning helps because the damage is internal. At that point the trade you want is damp proofing and stone conservation, and no longer a cleaner with a brush.

Cleaning Nineteenth Century Stone

Adelaide has an unusual amount of this housing stock in ordinary suburban use, well beyond the heritage registers. Bluestone and sandstone cottages and villas run right through Norwood, Unley, Prospect, Semaphore, Goodwood, Thebarton and the city squares, and plenty of them are rented or sold as everyday houses, much as the colonial stone of the Barossa Valley is. What they add to a clean is fabric that modern methods damage. Lath and plaster ceilings, deep moulded skirtings and architraves, sash windows with original glass, pressed metal, tessellated hall tile and painted timber sills all take hand work and slower passes.

Outside the rule is washing and never blasting, and it admits no exceptions on this fabric. High pressure on soft sandstone, lime mortar or a weathered face takes material off the building, and on a wall with salt damp it drives water into exactly the fabric that is already failing. The method is a low pressure soft wash with detergent and dwell time, and house washing quoted that way is the service you want. An operator who proposes to pressure wash a bluestone front has answered the question for you.

Almost all of this stock carries lead paint, and it is a dust problem more than a contact one. Paint made before the 1970s routinely contained lead, sound intact coatings are stable, and the hazard comes from abrading or pressure washing them. Wet methods, a mild detergent, soft cloths and no dry sanding is the approach on old painted surfaces. Anyone paid to disturb lead paint takes on duties under the work health and safety framework that SafeWork SA administers.

Terracotta, Slate and the Gutter Year

Adelaide roofs are a different mix from the eastern capitals and the material decides the method. Terracotta tile is everywhere across the middle and inner suburbs, slate turns up on the older stone housing, and corrugated steel runs through both the oldest and the newest stock. Each one behaves differently under a cleaner. Terracotta is porous and unglazed on older tiles, so it holds lichen and takes a soft wash at low pressure. Slate is brittle and will not take foot traffic, which means anything on a slate roof is an access and fall protection job before it is a cleaning job. Painted steel sheds growth readily but loses its coating under high pressure.

Material choice therefore decides the method before anybody quotes a figure. The practical consequence is that roof cleaning on a tiled Adelaide roof is a treat, dwell and low pressure rinse at $420 to $980, while on slate the quote should name the access method before it names a figure. Where the roof is heritage material, heritage roofing trades handle it rather than general cleaners, because a cracked slate or a crushed terracotta tile is a leak.

Gutters follow a dry summer and a wet winter, which gives a clear best time. The vegetation load in suburban Adelaide is moderate, dominated by street tree leaf and the plane trees of the inner east, so twice a year generally covers it. Gutter cleaning on a single storey comes to $170 to $410, and the sensible pattern is once in late autumn when the deciduous leaf is down and once in late spring. On the older housing the valleys matter more than the gutter line, because a nineteenth century roof has more junctions, and valley gutter cleaning, covering the internal gutters where two roof planes meet, is often priced separately for that reason.

One Adelaide specific belongs here before anybody goes up a ladder. A large share of houses here run a rainwater tank for the garden or the laundry, and the rule is the same as anywhere: before roof or gutter work the downpipes feeding the tank get diverted or disconnected, and they stay that way until decent rain has flushed the roof. Dislodged leaf, bird droppings and anything used on the roof otherwise end up in the supply, and rainwater tank cleaning afterwards costs more than the diversion would have.

Mould, Damp and the Minimum Standards

South Australia gives a tenant something to point at here, which not every state does.

Rental premises in this state must comply with prescribed minimum housing standards at the start of a tenancy, set under the Housing Improvement Act 2016 and the Housing Improvement Regulations 2017, and the Housing Safety Authority publishes what those standards require. The whole property standards include that a home be reasonably free from mould or other irritants, reasonably free from the adverse effects of moisture or damp, reasonably draught proof and weatherproof, and that it have effective drainage. Consumer and Business Services sets out the obligation and keeps the current detail. That wording matters because of how specific it is. A tenant in a Victorian era stone cottage with damp at the base of a wall is not arguing from general repair obligations alone, they are arguing against a named standard that uses the words moisture and damp. The obligation attaches on or before the tenant enters occupation, so the condition at the start of the tenancy is the reference point, which makes the entry condition report the single most valuable document either side holds.

Telling the cause from the symptom is still where the money is saved. Diluted bleach on a patch removes the colour and leaves every condition that produced it, so it comes back on the same wall. The retail products, Exit Mould and Selleys Rapid Mould Killer among them, behave the same way. Mould and damp treatment that lasts means getting air moving, making the exhaust fan genuinely discharge outside and nowhere near the roof space, and finding whatever has blocked the subfloor vents, which on an Adelaide cottage is often a garden bed built up against the wall.

Condensation and a building fault look similar on a ceiling and need different trades. Where moist household air meets a cold surface you get condensation, so it shows in the top corners of external walls, behind furniture against an outside wall and on bathroom ceilings, and it answers to heat and air movement. Water coming in from outside is a building fault and ventilation will not touch it. The giveaway is a wet patch that follows the rain, not the weather inside the house, and for that ceiling mould removal is the second step and the roof is the first.

Vacate Cleaning and the Four Week Bond

South Australia reduced the maximum bond, which shifts the arithmetic on a vacate clean.

For most new tenancies the maximum bond is now four weeks rent rather than six, with six still available where the rent exceeds $800 a week. On a $600 a week house that puts roughly $2,400 at stake where it used to be $3,600, and it narrows the gap between the bond and the cost of doing the clean properly. A $450 to $950 vacate clean against a $2,400 bond is simple arithmetic, and the cheapest quote is rarely the one that protects the larger number. Scope is where two vacate quotes on the same house diverge. The standard inclusions are the oven and rangehood, every wet area including the shower screen and grout, internal glass with tracks and sills, skirtings, light fittings, fans, cupboard interiors, wall marks and the laundry. The items that regularly sit outside the headline figure are carpets, external windows, the garage or carport, blinds and the garden, and on an Adelaide property the shower scale is the one that catches people out, because a screen with two years of mineral film on it will not pass an inspection and will not come off with a general clean.

An agent inspecting a vacate clean in this state is checking against the entry condition report, so the useful discipline is to read that report before booking anybody. If the report recorded the oven as already marked or the grout as already stained, you are not obliged to improve on the condition you received. Where the report is silent the presumption runs against the tenant. Dated entry photographs are worth more than any argument at the end.

Carpets deserve a decision of their own, made deliberately and with the agreement open in front of you. Where the tenancy agreement requires professional cleaning of carpets the receipt is what satisfies it, and carpet cleaning at $35 to $75 a room is cheaper than a dispute. Where the agreement is silent, the test is the condition at entry, a judgement worth making with the report in hand well before the day.

Routine Inspections Capped at Four a Year

This is a South Australian rule with a direct and unusual effect on household cleaning budgets.

Routine inspections in this state are capped at four a year, with notice of between seven and twenty eight days required. That turns the inspection clean from an unpredictable scramble into something a tenant can plan and price. Four known events a year, each with at least a week of warning, is a schedule, which is a very different thing. For a tenant the practical move is to decide once which of the four gets professional help, treating each one the same. A tidy and a thorough wipe-down handles most of them. One a year, generally the one before the lease anniversary, justifies a paid house clean at $130 to $240, because that is the inspection most likely to feed into a renewal decision or a rent review.

A second effect shows up for cleaners more than for tenants. Because inspections are capped and noticed, demand for one-off cleans clusters in the week before common inspection dates, and agents running a large rent roll tend to inspect in batches. Ringing on the Monday for a Thursday inspection in a busy week is how people end up paying a premium or taking whoever is free. For a landlord or agent the same cap argues for a condition record at each visit. Four dated sets of photographs a year, kept with the entry condition report, is a far stronger position at the end of a tenancy than a recollection, and it is also how a genuine building problem such as damp gets documented while it is still cheap to fix.

Carpet, Extraction and Adelaide Dust

Two different things load an Adelaide carpet and they want different answers. The first is ordinary soil and it behaves as it does anywhere. The other is the fine dry dust that a hot Adelaide summer generates, which arrives through open doors and windows on a northerly, works down through the pile into the backing and sits where no domestic vacuum reaches. That dust is abrasive rather than merely untidy, because the grains grind against the base of the fibres underfoot and the wear is finished before a traffic path looks flattened.

Only hot water extraction removes it, at $35 to $75 a room, and the seasonal variable is drying. From November through March a house left open dries in four to six hours. In July the same job wants the heating on and the house closed, and the honest answer from a good operator is that it will take most of a day. Low moisture and encapsulation work, at $35 to $70 a room, is back in use within the hour and suit a quick turnaround, but they reach less deeply into grit sitting in the backing.

Upholstery follows the same logic and is more often neglected. It sits in the same rooms, takes the same dust and almost never gets booked at the same time as the carpet. Fabric lounges in a house with the doors open all summer collect the same dust, and upholstery cleaning at $45 to $130 a seat deals with it. The question worth asking is fibre, because a linen or viscose cover will not take the water that a synthetic weave shrugs off.

Windows, Scale Spotting and Exterior Washing

Window pricing here follows the ordinary variables and then one local one. Window cleaning runs $180 to $440 inside and out on an average house, moving with pane count, second storey access and whether tracks and screens are included. The local variable is the water itself. Where a garden sprinkler or a hose reaches the glass, hard water leaves mineral spotting that an ordinary clean will not remove, and spots left for years can etch the surface permanently. The practical fix is upstream: keep sprinkler overspray off the glass and the problem does not accumulate.

Twice a year suits most of Adelaide, which is less often than a coastal Perth or Sydney house needs, because the salt load away from the gulf is modest. Properties at Henley Beach, Glenelg, Semaphore and along the gulf are the exception and want three cleans a year, though nothing here approaches what the open Southern Ocean delivers down on the Fleurieu Peninsula, with the frames and tracks rinsed with fresh water, which a panes-only clean never does.

Exterior washing is where the stone rule bites again. On brick veneer and painted render a pressure clean is straightforward. On bluestone, sandstone, soft brick or a wall with active salt damp a soft wash at low pressure with detergent and dwell time is the method, and anybody quoting a pressure job on that fabric should not get it. Paths and driveways are a separate matter again, and concrete and paver cleaning at $220 to $520 handles the algae that builds on a shaded southern path through winter.

Flyscreens are the standing omission on almost every quote, and they are worth raising deliberately. They hold a season of dust, they are fiddly to remove and refit, and flyscreen cleaning is usually a separate line at $8 to $18 a screen. Ask whether screens are in or out before comparing two window quotes, because one of them has almost certainly assumed they are out.

Short Stay Letting and the Festival Weeks

South Australia handles short stay accommodation differently from several other states and the difference matters.

There is no state wide registration scheme for short term rental accommodation here of the kind that Western Australia introduced from 1 January 2025. In South Australia the position comes from the planning system and from the individual council, and PlanSA is where the Planning and Design Code that applies to a property can be checked. A householder letting a room or a whole house should confirm the position with their own council before assuming, because the answer genuinely differs between local government areas. For cleaning the compliance question changes the paperwork while leaving the work alone. On a three bedroom house a changeover comes to $125 to $235, rising to $195 to $380 on four to six bedrooms, and the scope is tight and standardised: linen, bathrooms, kitchen and glassware, floors, restocking, a damage check with photographs and a reset to presentation standard. Whether linen is handled by the cleaner or sent to a commercial laundry should be explicit in the quote, because it moves the figure materially.

The Adelaide calendar has a peak that catches new operators out. Late February and March bring the Festival, the Fringe, WOMADelaide and the motorsport weekend in close succession, and inner suburban short stay occupancy runs near capacity through it. Changeover teams are committed months ahead and peak loadings of twenty to thirty per cent are normal through those weeks. An owner coming to the market in early February looking for a changeover team is generally too late for that season, and holiday rental cleaning booked in spring costs less and gets the dates.

Commercial, Office and Strata Work

Commercial cleaning is priced on a different basis and the inner city has its own pattern.

Office contracts run $48 to $75 an hour, with consumables charged on top of the rate, and the scope in a modern Adelaide tenancy covers floors, kitchen and bathroom areas, bins, reception glass and desks where a clear desk policy makes that practical. Office cleaning through the city grid and the North Terrace and Waymouth Street corridors is competitive and most buildings have an established contractor, so the useful question for a tenant is what the base building provides against what the tenancy is paying for separately. Strata and apartment common areas are a distinct market again. Foyers, lifts, corridors, bin rooms and carparks are typically on a weekly or twice weekly visit, and strata cleaning is arranged by the body corporate and not by any individual owner. An owner who is unhappy with the standard in the common areas is raising it at a committee meeting, where the contract sits. Inside the lot is the owner’s own arrangement, and access, lift bookings and loading dock times are what push the figure on a mid-rise building.

A third layer exists here in unusual proportion for a city this size, and it competes directly with household work. The city carries a substantial hospitality and small venue trade through the east end and Hindley Street, and venue cleaning runs on a post-trade overnight pattern, the reverse of a weekday rhythm, at $55 to $95 an hour with weekends as the load. That is the reverse of an office contract and it competes with residential changeover work for the same people through the Festival weeks.

Pricing Suburb by Suburb

Prices across Adelaide track the building and the access more than the postcode value. The inner east and inner south carry the highest figures, and the reason is fabric and not wealth. Norwood, Kensington, Unley, Malvern, Goodwood and Hyde Park hold a large share of bluestone and sandstone housing with original interiors, so a greater proportion of the work is hand work and a greater proportion of the properties want a stone aware method. Inside, a three bedroom property runs $150 to $265, with a stone premium on top of anything exterior.

The middle suburbs are the broad market and the most competitive. Prospect, Croydon, Woodville, Glenelg East, Mitcham, Marion and Campbelltown run $130 to $240 with a mix of interwar bungalow, terracotta tile and post-war brick, plenty of operators and easy parking. Hard water scale is the main local line in this band and salt damp turns up on the older stock in it. The northern and southern growth corridors are the value end. Munno Para, Andrews Farm, Blakeview, Seaford, Aldinga and the newer estates sit at $120 to $215 with modern stock, uncomplicated access and local operators. What they add instead is construction dust on a new estate block with bare ground, and builders cleaning at $420 to $980 on a handover is a line of its own.

Travel only becomes a real line item past the rural fringe, where the arithmetic begins to resemble the Murraylands and Riverland and minimum job values appear on ordinary work. The coastal suburbs run on a different exterior schedule again. Henley Beach, Grange, Semaphore, Glenelg, Brighton and Seacliff price much as the middle suburbs inside, and then add salt. Coastal glass wants three cleans a year where two would do inland, metal fittings want regular fresh water rinsing, and the hills face suburbs at Burnside, Stonyfell, Rostrevor and Teringie shift into a different pattern again with canopy and gutters entering the conversation, much as they do up in the Adelaide Hills proper.

SA Tenancy Law and the Condition Report

South Australian tenants sit in a stronger position than several other states and the paperwork is how it is used.

The reforms that took effect from 1 July 2024 changed a number of things at once. A rent increase is permitted only once every twelve months and not within twelve months of the agreement starting. Landlords and agents must advertise premises at a fixed amount and must not solicit or invite an offer of higher rent, under what is known as the rent bidding prohibition. Tenants may keep pets subject to prior approval and reasonable conditions. Routine inspections are capped at four a year with notice required. Bonds are capped at four weeks rent for most new tenancies, with six weeks available above $800 a week. Consumer and Business Services publishes the current detail of all of it.

What this state does have, and what makes the difference in a damp argument, is a prescribed set of minimum housing standards that names moisture, damp and mould directly. A tenant is not relying only on general repair obligations. The standards oblige a landlord to deliver premises free of mould and free of the effects of damp, and they apply at the start of the tenancy.

A residential tenancy dispute that cannot be settled goes to the South Australian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, which lists housing and rentals among its case types and handles breaches, end of tenancy matters, hardship and excessive rent. Having a tribunal in place of a court as the forum matters practically, because the process is built to be used without a lawyer. Evidence is still what settles a dispute, whatever the standards say. In an older stone house the line between rising damp in the building and condensation from the occupant is exactly what the evidence has to establish, and the entry report is what earns its keep there. Keep the entry report, photograph everything on entry and exit with dates, put every repair request in writing and keep the reply, and get a quote or invoice for anything you claim.

Know What to Look Out For in an Adelaide Quote

Most Adelaide disappointments come from a scope gap, very seldom from poor work. The first thing to check is whether the quote names the substrate. On a bluestone or sandstone house, a quote that says exterior wash without saying how is a risk, because the difference between a soft wash and a pressure job is the difference between cleaning the wall and taking material off it. Where salt damp is visible at the base of a wall, a quote that does not mention it has not been written by somebody who looked.

Next comes the scale question, and it is particular to this city. A bathroom with two years of mineral film on the screen will not come up in a general clean, so either the quote includes scale work and says so, or it will come back as a variation on the day. Ask directly whether descaling the shower glass and tapware is in the price. The third is the exclusions, and they are predictable. Flyscreens, window tracks, the oven if it is badly built up, carpets, the garage or carport, blinds and the garden sit outside most headline figures. None of that is dishonest, it is just how the market quotes, and the only defence is one written list of inclusions applied to every quote you compare.

The fourth is insurance, and on this housing stock it matters more than usual. A cleaner working in your house should carry public liability cover, and on a heritage property that matters more than usual because the cost of a damaged pressed metal ceiling or an etched tessellated hall far exceeds the clean. A quote delivered over the phone with nothing seen and no photographs deserves caution more than relief, because the hours follow from condition and nobody can judge condition sight unseen. The fifth is specific to the older housing and easy to miss. Ask whether the operator has worked on lath and plaster, lime mortar and pre-1970 paint. Somebody who has only cleaned modern housing can do genuine damage with the best of intentions, which makes it a fair question to put plainly.

Getting Quotes Right in Adelaide

A little preparation changes the quality of the figures that come back.

Start with photographs, because they do more than anything else here. Send pictures of the shower screen and tapware, the oven, any original ceiling or hall tile, the exterior walls at ground level and the gutters. On Adelaide housing that returns a realistic range instead of a figure that moves once somebody walks through the front door, and it is the single highest value thing a householder can do. Then name the local items explicitly, because nothing here is safely assumed. Shower glass and tapware scale, the state of the grout, any stone at ground level and whether it is fretting, window tracks and flyscreens, external glass with frames, the garage or carport, blinds, carpets and the garden. A quote written against that list is comparable with another quote written against the same list.

Four questions settle most of it in the first conversation. Is cutting the existing scale off the glass and tapware inside the price, or billed as a separate restoration? Does the operator have direct experience of bluestone, lath and plaster and pre-1970 paintwork? On the exterior, is the method a soft wash at low pressure, since a pressure job is the wrong answer on this fabric? And what covers the roof, given that terracotta is brittle and slate takes no foot traffic at all? A contractor who fields all four without hesitating knows this city.

Then weigh the three quotes against each other properly. List the inclusions once, set the quotes beside that list, and charge each exclusion back to the quote that omitted it. Three quotes is a realistic ask through most of the year and an optimistic one in late February. The shower scale, the flyscreens and anything outside the house proper go missing most often here.