Spring cleaning… every day!
During the open season, the house team can be found vacuuming the visitor route, which takes a massive three hours each day! The wooden floors are then dry mopped to keep them clean and prevent damage, and over 100 windows and 32 fireplaces are vacuumed each month. When did you last vacuum your windows?
True to Calke’s spirit of decline, the abandoned rooms are left to accumulate dust – the house team dust those rooms just once or twice a year. In the show rooms, however, the surfaces are dusted every day, and all the objects get a full dusting every week.
Usually, we have a team of volunteers doing all sorts of vital jobs around the house, from collections cleaning and conservation work, to collection management and inventory logging. While we're currently operating a small team during lockdown, we can't wait to welcome out volunteers back soon – they help us keep Calke alive.
The big winter clean
While the house is closed over the winter, there’s a hub of activity behind closed doors – we call it ‘the big winter clean’. This involves thoroughly cleaning every room on the visitor route, from the collection items themselves to the walls and carpets around them. Some of the rooms have such high ceilings that we have to build a scaffold to clean the high walls and collections, such as in the Saloon.
Almost all of the show-room furniture at Calke has an individually designed, shaped, and handmade dust-cover. During the winter months, after the collection has been through its deep clean, it is vital to cover the furniture to ensure it is not exposed to any unnecessary light or dust.
In order to do this effectively, each piece of furniture must have a perfectly fitted dust cover. Calke’s dust covers were made many years ago by a team of textiles volunteers, who made each slip the perfect size and shape for its item.
