Deep Victorian skirting in a Notting Hill villa is a different animal to the thin MDF strip in a new-build flat. It’s tall, sometimes eight or nine inches, moulded into an ogee curve that runs the length of the room, and every ridge in that curve is a shelf for muck. Up above, the picture rail sits at nine or ten feet, forgotten for years at a time. Nobody looks at a picture rail. That’s exactly why it ends up filthy.
I clean a lot of these rooms. The work isn’t complicated, but people go at it in the wrong order and with the wrong kit, then wonder why they’ve spent an afternoon smearing grey water around and made it worse.
Why do skirting boards in a period living room get so grubby?
Two things land on skirting: dust and grease. On their own, neither is much bother. Together they form a film – a sort of grey tacky skin that a dry cloth just polishes rather than lifts. In a living room with an old chimney breast, or a kitchen that opens off the lounge, that film builds faster than anyone expects. Cooking vapour drifts. It settles low, on the coolest surfaces, and skirting near a floor is about the coolest surface in the room.
Then there’s foot traffic. The bottom four inches of any skirting in a hallway-adjacent living room takes scuffs from shoes and hoover heads. Scuffs are a separate problem from film and need a separate approach.
The top edge is where the real dirt sits
Run your finger along the flat top of a skirting board and you’ll find a grey roll of felted dust that’s been gathering since the last proper clean. Nine times out of ten this is the bit people miss entirely, because they clean the vertical face they can see and ignore the horizontal ledge they can’t. On deep Victorian boards that ledge can be half an inch wide. It holds a remarkable amount.
What order should you clean skirting and picture rails in?
Top down. Always. If you do the skirting first and then knock the picture rail, everything you disturb up high floats down and lands on the clean board below, and you’re doing it twice.
So: picture rail, then walls if they need it, then skirting, then floor. The floor comes last because the wet-wiping of skirting flicks dirty droplets down onto it no matter how careful you are.
Dry before wet is the other rule. On both skirting and rail, get the loose dust off dry first – a soft brush, or the vacuum’s dusting brush if the moulding’s sound. Go straight in with a wet cloth and you turn dry dust into mud and push it into every groove of the moulding. Then you’re picking grey paste out of an ogee curve with a cotton bud, and that’s an afternoon gone.
Get the cobwebs before anything else
Picture rails and the cornice above them are prime cobweb territory in a tall room. A cobweb loaded with dust, dragged by a wet cloth, streaks the wall grey for two feet. Take them off first with a long-handled soft brush or the extended vacuum tool, working the top lip of the rail and the wall-to-ceiling angle. Only then start the proper clean.
What you find on an old picture rail once the dust is off can surprise you. In flats where somebody smoked for thirty years, there’s a yellow-brown film baked onto the rail that a plain wipe won’t shift and that comes away on the cloth the colour of weak tea. That’s tar, and it wants the same sugar soap I’ll get to below, worked gently. The other thing to watch on a proper period rail is the paint itself. Some of these have been coated in old distemper or a soft limewash that turns to chalk the second a wet cloth touches it – wipe once and you’ve a white smear and a bare patch. Dab a hidden corner with a damp finger before you commit. If it comes off milky, keep it dry and dust only.
How do you reach a picture rail in a ten-foot room without wrecking yourself?
This is where most people come unstuck, and it’s the part I’d push you to take seriously, because it’s the part that hurts you.
A standard step stool gets you to about seven feet of working height. A picture rail in a Stoke Newington first-floor conversion – I did one on Albion Road last winter, ceilings well over nine feet – is beyond that. You’ve got three real options and I’ve got opinions on all of them.
A telescopic duster or a flat-headed pole mop with a microfibre pad lets you clean the rail from the floor. Safe and quick for a light dust. For any real built-up film it’s useless, because you can’t put pressure through a pole without it skating off the moulding. Fine for maintenance, hopeless for a first deep clean.
A leaning ladder against the wall is what a lot of decorators use, but a picture rail runs along the whole perimeter, so you’re repositioning a ladder every four feet around the entire room, over furniture, near a bay window. Slow, and a faff.
A small platform step or a hop-up with a wide standing area is what I bring. You get both hands free and enough height to work the rail with real pressure and see what you’re doing. It costs you carrying it up the stairs. Worth it.
Whatever you stand on, move it rather than reach off the side of it. Nine times out of ten a fall off a step happens because someone stretched sideways to save themselves shifting the thing eighteen inches. Don’t be that person on a Saturday.
One person up, one person feeding cloths
If there are two of you, the job halves. One works the height, the other rinses and wrings and passes up a clean cloth, keeps the bucket water from going to sludge, moves the step along. Alone, you climb down every few feet to rinse, which is where the temptation to over-reach creeps in.
Which products shift the build-up, and which just move it around?
Right, the bit everyone gets wrong.
For light dust and the odd mark, warm water with a drop of washing-up liquid on a wrung-out microfibre does the job on painted skirting and rails. Wrung-out is the operative bit. A dripping cloth on old skirting runs water down behind the board and into the gap above the floor, and on lath-and-plaster or original timber that’s asking for trouble.
For the greasy film – that grey skin I mentioned – washing-up liquid won’t touch it properly. You want sugar soap. It’s cheap, and it cuts through grease-and-dust film like nothing else in a domestic cupboard. Decorators have used it for a century. Mix it weak, weaker than the box says, wipe it on, give it a moment, wipe it off with clean water. Test a patch first on old paintwork, because sugar soap will take the sheen off some finishes and on a very old flat oil paint it can lift the lot.
Scuffs are their own thing. Black hoover-head rubber marks and shoe scuffs sit on top of the paint rather than in a film. A melamine sponge – the white magic-eraser type – takes those off gloss and satinwood skirting in seconds. Go gently, because that sponge is a mild abrasive and it’ll dull a matt or eggshell finish if you scrub. On gloss it’s brilliant. I keep one in the van at all times.
One thing I’ll be blunt about. The current fashion for painting living-room skirting in flat matt emulsion, same shade as the wall, is a cleaning disaster, and I’ll talk a client out of it every time I’m asked. It looks lovely in a magazine and it’s ruined the first time someone wipes a scuff off it, because matt emulsion can’t be cleaned without burnishing to a shiny patch. Skirting takes abuse. It wants a wipeable finish – satinwood at the very least. A designer will tell you gloss is dated. A designer doesn’t have to clean it.
Steer clear of anything with silicone or wax polish
People reach for spray polishes because they smell nice and leave a shine. On skirting they leave a film that grabs the next fortnight’s dust and holds it. Every product that promises to “repel dust” is building a sticky layer that does the opposite over time. Warm water with a bit of washing-up liquid, and sugar soap for the bad stuff. That’s the lot.
How do you keep them clean once you’ve done the hard work?
A deep clean of skirting and picture rails in a big period room is a couple of hours’ work. You don’t want to do it twice a year. The trick is a light dry pass often enough that the film never gets a chance to form.
Once a month, run the soft dusting brush of the vacuum along the top edge of the skirting and, with the extension, along the picture rail. Dry, quick, no products. Ten minutes for a whole room. That’s the whole maintenance secret and it’s dull, so nobody does it.
If you’ve a room with an open fire you use, halve that interval. Soot is fine and greasy and it settles everywhere, and it turns the picture rail lip grey in weeks. A flat I look after near Clapham Common has a working fireplace, and its picture rails need wiping monthly where another client’s go six months easily.
The radiator stripe nobody checks
The skirting behind and beside radiators is the one spot the monthly dust won’t reach. Convected heat drives a plume of dust up the wall and bakes a brown stripe onto the skirting and wall above the radiator. That needs the wet sugar-soap treatment and there’s no getting round it – you’ll be down on the floor with a thin cloth working the gap.
That radiator stripe is usually the first thing I notice walking into a room somebody swears is clean.
