Cleaning that runs with the fitout and finishes with a pre-occupancy detail, so your team walks into a floor that looks the way the render did. New joinery, glass partitions, ceiling tiles and fresh carpet treated as the fragile new finishes they are, not as a builders clean.
Office fitout cleaning has two stages: progressive cleaning while trades are working, and a pre-occupancy detail clean after the last trade leaves but before furniture and IT are installed. It differs from a builders clean in that every product must be matched to brand-new finishes. Pro Clean Corp quotes one-off project work at $40 to $50 per hour, priced as a fixed crew-hours estimate for the specific floor.
A fitout is a construction project happening inside a finished building, and that combination creates its own cleaning problem. The floor above and below is occupied, the lift lobby is shared with tenants in business attire, and the dust your trades generate travels into common areas the landlord is extremely interested in. Cleaning during the fitout is partly housekeeping and partly containment.
A progressive clean through the fitout keeps packaging, offcuts and dust off the floor between trades, keeps the lift lobby and corridor presentable so the building manager stays comfortable, and keeps the dust load down before it settles into ceiling voids and carpet where it becomes far harder to remove. On a six-week fitout, a light weekly clean will materially reduce the size of the final job.
The pre-occupancy detail is the visible one. Every surface brought to a finished standard, film off, residues removed, glass detailed, joinery cleaned inside and out, amenities commissioned, and floors finished last. If your project is a base-build or shell handover rather than a tenant fitout, the equivalent stage is a builders final clean.
The fastest way to turn a successful fitout into a defect list is to clean new finishes with the wrong product. Two-pack polyurethane joinery marks under solvent. Natural stone benchtops etch under anything acidic, which includes most bathroom cleaners. Powder-coated and anodised aluminium frames scratch under anything abrasive and haze under solvent. Timber veneer will not tolerate free water sitting on it. Acoustic fabric wall panels and pinboard cannot be wet cleaned at all.
We work from the finishes schedule where the fitout contractor provides it, which is the single most useful document you can hand a cleaning crew. Where it is not available, the default is pH-neutral product, minimal moisture, microfibre rather than scourers, and a test in a concealed area before anything unfamiliar goes onto a visible surface. Plastic blades only on coated substrates, never metal.
Joinery is cleaned inside as well as out. Drawers, shelves, cupboard interiors and cable voids collect the drilling swarf, sawdust and offcuts that fall in during installation, and every one of them will be opened on the first day of occupancy. Kitchenette cabinetry, appliance interiors and the void behind and under the fridge space are part of the same pass.
New carpet. Carpet tile and broadloom arrive carrying manufacturing residue and pick up adhesive spots and debris during installation. It needs slow multi-pass HEPA vacuuming rather than one fast run, with spot treatment matched to the fibre and tested first. We do not wet extract new carpet unless the installer confirms it is appropriate for that product and backing. Ongoing care afterwards sits with our office carpet cleaning team.
Glass partitions. Frameless and framed glass is the defining feature of most modern Sydney fitouts and the surface every visitor evaluates. Both faces are cleaned with a squeegee and detailed at the edges, tracks and channels are vacuumed before wet cleaning so grout and dust do not wash back down, and applied manifestation film is cleaned around rather than over so a printed edge is never lifted. Silicone smears at the junctions come off with a plastic blade and a compatible solvent.
Ceilings. Grid, tiles, diffusers, sprinkler escutcheons, speakers and light fittings hold the fine dust that later drifts down onto a finished floor. Grid rails are wiped, tiles are lightly vacuumed rather than wiped (mineral fibre tiles stain instantly with water), and any tile marked or damaged during the fitout is flagged to the contractor for replacement rather than scrubbed — a scrubbed acoustic tile looks worse than a dirty one.
Before staff arrive, the parts of the fitout that people will physically touch need commissioning rather than just cleaning. Amenities and end-of-trip facilities are descaled and disinfected, tapware and fittings polished, and every fixture run to check for installation debris in the aerators. The kitchenette is treated as a food area: sink, benches, splashback, appliance interiors, and the inside of the dishwasher and fridge, which are almost always delivered with packaging residue still in them.
Touch points get a disinfection pass on the final visit: door hardware, glass door pulls, light and blind switches, lift call buttons on the tenancy floor, meeting room controls, and the height-adjustable desk controllers that came out of a warehouse rather than a clean room. It is a short task and it is the difference between a floor that is clean and a floor that is ready.
Where the fitout includes new washrooms or end-of-trip showers, this is also the right moment to set up the ongoing consumables and unit arrangement rather than discovering on day one that nothing is stocked. That is scoped through washroom hygiene services.
Cleaning is the last trade on a fitout, which means it absorbs every delay upstream. A project manager who tells the cleaning contractor about a two-day slip gets a crew resized around it; one who does not gets a crew that arrives to find caulking still wet. We work from the program, confirm the day before, and would rather move than clean a floor that is not ready.
The practical items we need from the PM are the finishes schedule, the building access requirements including dock and lift bookings and any after-hours permit, the trade sequence for the final week, and the furniture and IT delivery dates. The last one matters more than it sounds: cleaning before a furniture install means the install crew undoes half of it, cleaning after means working around fifty cartons of packaging.
At completion we walk the floor with the PM against a written checklist covering high level, glass, joinery, amenities, hardware and floors. Items raised are cleared on the spot where small and scheduled as a nominated return where not. We do not offer a free re-clean and we say so up front — return visits are quoted as return visits.
Fitout cleans are quoted as a fixed price built from a crew-hours estimate against the specific floor, using our published one-off rate of $40 to $50 per hour. We deliberately do not quote a flat rate per square metre, because square metres are a poor predictor here: two 400 square metre tenancies can differ by half a shift depending on how much glass partitioning, joinery and exposed services they carry.
The variables that move the number are the amount of glass and joinery, whether ceilings are exposed services or a gridded tile system, the floor finish, how much protective film is still in place and how long it has been there, whether a progressive clean has been running, and building access — a CBD tower with a booked dock and one goods lift consumes hours that a suburban ground-floor tenancy does not.
Send the floor plan, the finishes schedule and the occupancy date to get a fixed price. Call 1300 494 983 or enquire online. If you are moving out of a tenancy as well as into one, the outgoing side is covered by office make good cleaning.
Finishes schedule first, pH-neutral default, concealed test.
Crew-hours estimate for your tenancy, not a rate per square metre.
Written checklist at completion, returns quoted as returns.
Book two points, not one. A progressive clean should start once the messy trades are running so dust and packaging do not accumulate for weeks, and the pre-occupancy detail clean belongs after every trade including caulking and touch-up painting has finished but before furniture, IT and signage installation. The most common mistake in Sydney fitouts is booking a single clean too early, which means the space is cleaned once and then made dirty again by three more trades.
Yes, and carefully. New commercial carpet or carpet tile arrives with manufacturing residue, adhesive spots and installation debris pressed into the pile, and it needs a slow multi-pass vacuum with a HEPA machine rather than a single fast run. Spot treatment of adhesive is done with a product matched to the fibre and tested in a concealed area first. We do not wet extract brand new carpet unless the installer confirms it is appropriate, because premature extraction on some backings can cause shrinkage or delamination.
Yes, and weekend work is how most Sydney CBD and North Sydney fitout cleans are actually delivered, because that is when the loading dock and goods lift are available and the floor is empty of trades. Building management usually requires an approved after-hours access request, a site induction and a current certificate of currency before the crew is allowed in, so send us the building requirements as soon as the date is set and we will lodge the paperwork rather than losing the Saturday to it.
By choosing product for the substrate rather than for speed. New joinery veneers, powder-coated frames, anodised aluminium, natural stone and specialty wall finishes each have products that will damage them, and a general-purpose spray used across all of them will mark at least one. We work from the finishes schedule where the fitout contractor provides it, use pH-neutral products by default, test anything unfamiliar in a concealed area, and use plastic rather than metal blades on any coated or powder-coated surface.
Yes, and it should be scoped explicitly because the labour depends on how long the film has been in place rather than how much of it there is. Film left on glass through a Sydney summer bakes on and leaves adhesive that has to be softened and scraped at the correct angle with a fresh blade. Tell us at quoting stage what is still filmed and roughly when it was applied, and never leave film on longer than the manufacturer states just because the handover date slipped.
Yes, and there is a practical advantage to it. A crew that has cleaned the space through the fitout already knows the floor finishes, the joinery, the amenities layout and which surfaces are fragile, which is exactly the knowledge a new contractor spends the first month acquiring. Ongoing contracts are month-to-month with 30 days written notice, so taking us on after the fitout does not lock you into anything if the arrangement is not right.
Send the floor plan, finishes schedule and occupancy date. We come back with a fixed price and a crew plan that fits the program.