Choosing a cleaner for older Balmain premises with delicate surfaces

A modern commercial floor is designed to be cleaned aggressively. Much of what sits in an older Balmain premises is not. Original boards may have a finish nobody has documented, encaustic tiles can be stripped by the wrong alkaline product, and painted timber joinery marks under a scourer. The damage is usually gradual, which means it is well advanced before anybody connects it to the cleaning method being used.

The problem is rarely carelessness. It is a standard routine applied to a non-standard building. A cleaner given a general instruction will use the product they always use, and on most sites that is entirely correct. The buyer's job during comparison is to find out whether the provider notices the difference, because a provider who never asks about surfaces will not start asking after they have won the work.

Walk the premises with each provider and stop at the surfaces you are worried about. Ask what they would use, what they would avoid and how they would find out if they did not know. A good answer often includes an admission: that they would test a small area first, or that a particular floor should be assessed by a specialist before any programme starts. Certainty about an unknown finish is the wrong sort of confidence.

Ask also who will make that decision in practice. If the cleaner attending chooses products from a van without reference to anyone, then the site knowledge lives in one person's head and leaves when they do. If products are specified for the site and recorded, the arrangement survives a change of staff. That distinction matters far more in an older building than in a fitted-out office suite.

Turn the walkthrough into a short surface schedule: the floor types, the joinery, any stone or metal that concerns you, and the agreed treatment for each. Give it to every provider so their proposals answer the same question. It takes an hour and it removes the most expensive kind of disagreement, which is the one discovered after a finish has changed colour and nobody can say which product was used.

Then decide what sits outside the contract. Restoration, recoating, stone honing and specialist timber work are separate disciplines, and a general cleaning provider naming them as exclusions is being accurate rather than unhelpful. A proposal that silently includes everything in a heritage-era building is more worrying than one that draws a line and explains where the line sits, why it is there and who should be handling the work instead.