Cleaning in Mentone: What Older Bayside Homes Need Most

Mentone's housing stock is unusually mixed for a bayside suburb. Along the streets near the beach and the station you've got interwar Californian bungalows and Art Deco homes from the 1920s and 30s; through the middle of the suburb it's largely 1960s and 70s brick veneer; and threaded between them are newer townhouses on subdivided blocks. We clean all three regularly, and the older two have a set of problems that no generic cleaning checklist covers.

1. Subfloor damp and the smell that comes with it

Older Mentone homes sit on stumps with a ventilated subfloor, and those vents get blocked - by garden beds raised over the years, by concrete paths poured against the wall, by a deck built over the side of the house. Once airflow under the floor stops, moisture rises into floorboards, skirtings and carpet underlay.

The symptom is a musty smell that's strongest in the morning, strongest in the rooms furthest from the sun, and comes back a week after any amount of cleaning. Cleaning treats the surface; the fix is clearing the subfloor vents. It's worth walking the perimeter of the house and counting how many vents you can actually see - in homes this age it's usually fewer than there should be.

2. Original grout and 1930s bathroom tile

Period tiling is lovely and it's porous. Ninety-year-old grout has lost whatever seal it had, so it absorbs soap, water and staining rather than shedding them - which is why a bathroom can look worse right after being scrubbed hard, as the abrasive opens the surface further.

What works is a longer dwell time with an appropriate product and gentle mechanical action, not aggressive scouring. What we recommend afterwards is having the grout sealed. Cleaning unsealed period grout is a job you repeat every few months; sealing it turns it into a job you repeat once a year.

3. Dust in a house that may have lead paint

This one's genuinely important and rarely mentioned. Australian homes painted before 1970 very likely contain lead-based paint, and lead is a real hazard in household dust - particularly for young children. It concentrates around friction points: window sashes and sills, door jambs, skirting boards and anywhere paint is chalking or flaking.

The practical rules are simple. Never dry-sand or dry-scrape old paint. Don't dry-dust chalky painted surfaces - use a damp cloth so the particles bond to it instead of going into the air. Vacuum with sealed HEPA filtration rather than a machine that exhausts fines back into the room. Wash window sills and reveals wet, and rinse the cloth rather than reusing it around the house. If paint is actively flaking, that's a job for a licensed painter, not a cleaner.

4. Timber floors, and the wrong product

A lot of Mentone bungalows have original Baltic pine or hardwood under the carpet. The most common damage we see isn't wear - it's over-wet mopping and general-purpose spray cleaner on a polished or oiled floor. Water sitting in the boards' joins swells the timber; the wrong pH strips a finish over time. Barely damp mop, pH-neutral product, and dry it behind you.

5. Window reveals, sashes and the sea air

Mentone sits close enough to the bay that salt-laden air reaches most of the suburb. On older single-glazed windows that means two things: a faint film on the glass that ordinary glass cleaner smears rather than removes, and condensation collecting in the reveals on cold mornings, which is where mould starts in these houses. Wiping window reveals dry through winter is a two-minute habit that prevents a much bigger job.

What we'd prioritise in a first clean

1. Bathroom grout and silicone, treated properly rather than scrubbed hard
2. Window reveals, sills and sashes - wet-cleaned, especially in pre-1970 homes
3. Carpet steam cleaning, particularly in rooms over a poorly ventilated subfloor
4. Kitchen degreasing, including the rangehood filter and the wall above the stove
5. Skirting boards and floor edges, where old-house dust genuinely accumulates