How to Prep a London Home Before a Long Holiday Away

The flat doesn’t stop while you’re gone. That’s the thing people get wrong about it. They picture the place paused, everything holding still in the dark until they come back and switch it on again, which is a lovely image and about as accurate as thinking the fridge stops when the light goes off, and what happens instead is that a warm sealed box full of organic material carries on being a warm sealed box full of organic material, with nobody in it opening windows and nobody noticing anything.

Ten days, you’ll get away with almost anything. Six weeks is a different animal.

I clean a lot of flats the week people fly and a lot more the week they land, and the second job is always worse and always avoidable. Here’s what matters, roughly in the order it goes wrong.

Why does a shut-up London flat smell of drains within a fortnight?

Evaporation. There’s a water seal in the bend under every sink, bath, basin and shower in the flat, and its entire job is to stand between you and the soil stack. In a warm flat with the windows shut, that water goes. The seal in a shower gully or a rarely-used ensuite basin can drop far enough to stop working in about three weeks of August.

Top them up on the way out. Run every tap for ten seconds and flush both loos. If you’re going for more than a month, tip a couple of tablespoons of cooking oil down the ones you never use – it floats, and it stops the water underneath evaporating. It sounds like a bodge because it is one, and it works.

The washing machine is more common than the drains and nobody expects it. Detergent drawer, door seal, and about half a pint of grey water sitting in the sump. Shut the door on that in July and open it in September and you’ve got something that smells like a canal at low tide.

The last twenty minutes before the taxi

Machine door wedged open, dishwasher door wedged open, fridge door wedged open if you’ve emptied it, and every internal door in the flat left open too. Air has to be able to move between rooms or the far bedroom goes stale and the wardrobe goes worse. Two windows on the latch, one at each end of the flat, if the security situation allows it. If it doesn’t, trickle vents open, all of them.

Take the tea towels with you. They’re always damp, they always end up folded in a drawer, and they’re always the first thing that goes green.

What has to leave the flat with you?

The bin. Obviously the bin, and yet.

Everyone empties the kitchen bin. Almost nobody deals with what’s under the liner, which by August in a London kitchen is a film of leaked juice across the bottom of the plastic, and that’s the fruit fly nursery. Liner out, bin body washed with hot water and washing-up liquid, dried, left open and empty. Same for the food caddy. Same for the bathroom bin, which nobody thinks about and which contains, at minimum, a fortnight of cotton wool.

Then the fridge, and this is the one I’d put money on. You’ll clear the milk. What you’ll leave is the jar of harissa with the crust round the lid, the half lemon in cling film, the bag of spinach that’s already three days from liquid, and the drawer at the bottom that has liquid in it right now, which you know because you can hear it when you shut the door. Six weeks is a different animal. Spinach at six weeks is a smell that stays in the plastic after the spinach has gone.

Fruit bowl, and I mean the bowl as well as the fruit, because the ring of syrup a peach leaves under it is what the flies come back for. Bread bin. The bag of potatoes under the sink that will sprout, rot, then leak through the bag onto the cupboard base. Cat litter, if the cat’s gone to your mum’s.

The three things left behind every single time

Coffee grounds in the puck drawer. The capsule bin on the side of the machine. Whatever’s in the sink strainer.

Wet organic matter, dark warm plastic container, no ventilation. Every one of them will be furred by the time you’re back, and two of them are awkward to clean once they’re furred, because the plastic keeps the smell long after the fur’s been scrubbed off.

What breeds in an empty flat in August?

Clothes moths, and I’d rank them above every other risk on this list including the fridge.

London has had a bad moth situation for years now – Victorian conversions, wool carpets, gaps under floorboards, and no cold winter to knock the population back. The ones you see fluttering at the ceiling are males and they eat nothing. The damage is larvae, in the dark, in still air, on anything with keratin in it: wool, cashmere, silk, felt, and the underside of a rug where the pile meets the floor.

An empty flat in August is precisely what they want. Nothing moves, nothing gets worn, nobody vacuums, and the temperature sits in the twenties for weeks.

Bassein Park Road, Shepherd’s Bush, W12, a few summers back. Couple went to Australia for seven weeks. They came home to a wool rug that looked fine from standing height and had a hole the size of a dinner plate under the bed side of it, a suit jacket with both shoulders gone, and a jumper you could read through. They’d assumed a locked flat was a safe flat. The moths were already in that carpet when they left – seven undisturbed weeks was just the first proper run at it the larvae had had.

Why cedar balls and lavender bags do nothing

They don’t work. I’ll say it plainly, because the moth shelf in every hardware shop in London is largely theatre.

Cedar oil does something to newly hatched larvae at concentrations you’d only reach sealed inside a proper cedar chest. A ball hung in a wardrobe with a two-inch gap under the door is a scented ornament. Lavender bags are a scented ornament that smells nicer. Pheromone traps catch males, which tells you that you have a problem and does almost nothing about the females already down in the skirting.

What works is boring. Wash or dry-clean everything woollen before you go, because larvae feed on the sweat and skin oil on the fibre as much as the fibre, and clean wool is a much worse dinner. Bag the clean things in sealed plastic, not a suit carrier with an open bottom. Anything unwashable goes in the freezer for a fortnight and comes out fine. Vacuum the edges of every room, right into the gap where carpet meets skirting, then empty the vacuum outside the flat rather than into the kitchen bin you’ve just scrubbed.

Do you clean before you go, or when you get back?

Before. Everyone does this the wrong way round, and it’s the most useful sentence in this article.

The instinct is to leave it a bit messy, have the holiday, blitz it on the Sunday you’re back. Which hands every problem on this list – the fridge liquid, the larvae, the sump water, the film under the bin liner – six undisturbed weeks to develop. Clean first and none of them start. Clean after and you’ve stopped cleaning and started doing remediation, at a much higher price, jet-lagged, at ten at night.

The second reason is better than the first. Coming home to a clean flat is worth real money to you, and everyone knows the opposite feeling: the case dragged through the door into a kitchen that smells faintly of bin and a bed that isn’t made. That arrival costs you about two days of whatever good the holiday did.

The jobs that only work with nobody home

Some work wants an empty flat for a fortnight, so book it for the day you leave rather than the week you’re back.

Carpets first. A carpet cleaned properly is damp for hours, wants moving air and no footfall, and there’s no point in your ordinary life where you can give it that. An oven the same – a proper caustic clean wants the kitchen ventilated and nobody making toast in it. A stone floor that needs resealing, same again. A decent share of my August is spent in flats where nobody’s home, and the results beat anything I can manage on a Tuesday with a dog watching me.

What makes coming back not grim?

Strip the bed and make it up fresh before you go. That’s the trick. Nobody has ever told me it wasn’t worth it.

Then: bathroom cleaned and dry, one clean towel on the rail, loo lid down. Hoover last and walk backwards out of the flat. Leave the milk situation for later – buy a pint on the way from the station rather than trying to be clever with dates.

The one thing worth asking a neighbour to do

Not the bins. Not the post. Ask them to open the front door and stand in the hall for two minutes, once, somewhere around week three, and leave the windows on the latch for an afternoon if the weather’s decent. Two minutes of air exchange at the halfway point does more for a six-week absence than everything else you could delegate, and it means somebody has laid eyes on the place while there’s still time to ring you about it. Give them the moth brief as well if they’re the type: if the hall carpet has anything that looks like fine sand along the skirting, that’s larval casing and frass, and you’d rather know in week three than week seven.

Open every window the second you’re through the door. Before the cases, before the kettle, before you sit down. Two hours of that and it’s your flat again instead of somewhere you’ve walked into.

The Shepherd’s Bush couple bag everything woollen now. The rug didn’t make it.