How to Clean Under and Behind a Bed in a Tight Box Room

The box room in a converted terrace off Fladgate Road in Leytonstone measured about 2.1 metres by 3, and the double bed in it left a gap of roughly nine centimetres on one side and none at all on the other. The tenant wanted to know how to hoover under it. The answer, in that room, involved taking the door off its hinges, and I could see her deciding whether I was joking. It’s a clearance problem before it is a cleaning problem, and once you accept that, the rest of the job gets a lot more straightforward.

Why does so much dust end up under a bed?

Beds are the largest producers of dust in a home and the biggest obstacles to its removal, which is an unfortunate combination.

Human skin, textile fibres from bedding, and the fine mineral fraction that comes in off a London street settle continuously, and the space under a bed is a low-turbulence pocket where nothing disturbs them again. Every time somebody sits on the mattress, air is pushed out of the fibres and down, carrying particulate with it. The stuff accumulates as those grey rolls that build along the skirting.

In a box room the problem compounds, because these rooms almost always have the bed pushed against an external wall, frequently over the only radiator or beneath the only window. Airflow stops dead. Warm moist air from a sleeping adult meets a cold outside wall with a mattress against it, and you get the conditions for condensation in the exact place nobody looks for six months.

What the grey rolls are made of

Mostly fibre and skin, plus dust mite population and their faecal matter, which is the actual allergen rather than the mite itself. In carpeted rooms, add carpet fibre and whatever came off shoes. It is not dangerous to walk past. It matters if the person sleeping there has asthma or a dust mite allergy, and it matters if there is moth in the flat, which is the part people underestimate.

Can you clean under a bed without moving it?

Sometimes, badly. In a box room, usually not well enough to be worth the pretence.

The tools that make a real difference are cheap. A flexible long-reach vacuum wand, the flat kind sold for radiators and refrigerator coils, will get 60 to 80 centimetres under a divan through a nine-centimetre gap. A telescopic microfibre duster with a flat head gets further and picks up the light material without pushing air around. A damp microfibre cloth wrapped round a wallpaper scraper and worked along the skirting takes the film off a hard floor, and you can rinse and repeat until the cloth comes out grey rather than black.

What does not work: a standard vacuum head at an angle, a broom, and a robot vacuum. Robots need somewhere between 9 and 13 centimetres of clearance depending on model, and a London divan base sits at about 5. People spend £300 on a machine that spends its life bumping the bed frame and going round it.

Doing it properly at least twice a year

Whatever you manage with wands and dusters between times, the bed needs to come out fully at least twice a year, and once more if the room is carpeted. Everything under there – the wheel arch of dust behind the headboard, the mattress underside, the wall itself – needs eyes on it, not just a tool waved into a gap. Six-monthly is enough in a ventilated room. Quarterly in a north-facing box room with a radiator behind the bed.

How do you move a bed in a room with no floor to move it onto?

Here is the actual method, refined over a lot of small third bedrooms in Victorian conversions where the previous owner has stolen a metre off the box room to build a bathroom.

Strip the bed first – duvet, pillows, sheets, mattress protector – and get all of it out of the room, into the hall or the living room. This alone frees up more working space than anything else you will do.

Then the mattress. Stand it on its long edge against the wall opposite the door, or walk it out to the landing if there is room. A pocket-sprung double weighs 35 to 45 kilos and is awkward rather than heavy; slide it off the base rather than lifting, take the far corner first, and let it fall onto its edge under control. Two people if there are two people.

With the mattress out you can usually upend the base itself. A slatted frame stands on its end in the corner, and a divan base will too, though a divan with drawers wants the drawers out first. If the frame is a solid pine or metal double and the room is too tight for that, take it apart – four bolts on most frames, an Allen key, ten minutes, and you get better access than any amount of shuffling would have bought you. It’s a clearance problem, and disassembly is the honest answer to it in a room under seven square metres.

Ottoman beds with gas-lift storage are the exception. The base lifts and stays up, so you get access to the underside without moving anything, though you still cannot reach the floor beneath it, and lifting a fully loaded one on your own is how people put their backs out. Empty it before you lift.

Doors: a standard internal door off its hinges takes three minutes with a screwdriver and a block of wood, and in the very tightest rooms it turns an impossible job into a normal one. I do this perhaps once a month.

The order once the floor is clear

Cobwebs and the wall from the top down. Skirting behind the bed with a detergent solution, because that skirting has never been touched and will be black. Radiator fins with a long brush before you vacuum, so what comes out gets picked up. Then the floor – vacuum slowly in two directions on carpet, and on boards, vacuum before mopping so you are not making paste out of a year of dust.

Photograph the wall if there is mould, before you clean it.

What do you find under a box-room bed that matters?

Mould on the mattress underside is the first thing I look for, and in a north-facing box room I find it perhaps one time in four. It shows as grey-black speckling on the ticking, worst where the mattress meets the wall side. On a slatted frame it goes with an airing and a wipe. On a divan base with no ventilation, the mattress may be finished.

Moth is the second. Case-bearing clothes moth larvae need darkness and stillness, and the undisturbed wool carpet under a bed in a rarely-entered box room is the best habitat London offers them. Look for grazed patches where the pile is thinner and short silky tubes the size of a rice grain along the carpet edge. A flat in Walthamstow had lost a metre-wide patch under a guest bed that nobody had moved in three years, and the owners found it when they came to sell.

Then the ordinary things: pens, a phone charger, a sock, mouse droppings along the skirting in ground-floor flats, and the storage boxes.

The storage boxes are the problem

Under-bed storage is sold as the answer to small London bedrooms. It is one of the main reasons box rooms get filthy. Boxes block the reach of every tool, stop airflow across the floor, hold moisture against the boards, and make the twice-yearly clean such a production that people stop doing it. Vacuum-compression bags are worse – they are a sealed plastic slab across the whole footprint.

If you have a box room, keep the floor under the bed empty and put the storage on top of the wardrobe. Fewer things fit up there, which is the point.

How do you keep it from rebuilding in a room this size?

Pull the bed forward five centimetres from the wall and leave it there. That gap is the difference between a wall that dries and a wall that grows something, and nobody has ever noticed the room got smaller.

Wash bedding at 60 where the fabric allows, air the room every morning with the door shut and the window open for fifteen minutes, and run the long-reach wand under the bed once a month. Ten minutes.

Now the part that costs me money: do not book a professional deep clean for a box room. It is forty minutes of work behind a bed that you can do yourself in an afternoon, and the firms that quote it as a full room deep clean at £90 are pricing the awkwardness rather than the labour. What is worth paying for is hot-water extraction on a carpet with an established moth problem, or a mattress clean where somebody has been ill. The rest is a screwdriver and a Saturday.

If the box room is a let bedroom

In a licensed HMO the minimum floor area for a room slept in by one adult over ten is 6.51 square metres, and rooms are let at close to that figure across London – Willesden Green, Catford, Seven Sisters, anywhere with three-storey terraces and four tenants. At 6.51 square metres with a double bed in it, there is no configuration that leaves cleaning access on both sides. It’s a clearance problem baked into the letting, and the practical response is a single or a small double, a slatted frame on legs rather than a divan, and nothing stored underneath.

Landlords who fit ottoman beds into rooms that size are optimising for the photographs. The tenant is the one who finds the mattress in March.

The tenant in Leytonstone took her door off. Behind the headboard she found a patch of black mould the size of a dinner plate, and her landlord replaced the mattress within a fortnight of receiving the photograph.