Fantastic Services; back again to clean up the mess

Imagine that you hold a barbecue for 20 family and friends. Imagine that it’s the day after the barbecue. The guests have spent the day walking through your house leaving it a bit grubby and the kitchen is a disaster zone. It’s not the kind of thing you like to think about, is it?

This is exactly the scenario we found ourselves in a few weeks back. Thankfully, however, we didn’t have to worry too much about the tidying because we got Fantastic Services to blitz the house while Mrs Adams and I took the kids out for a couple of hours.

This was the second time Fantastic Services visited us (there has been a third, see below!). The company sent round two gardeners before the barbecue to knock our garden into shape after months of neglect and you can read the review here.

For those unaware, Fantastic offer a range of services; gardeners, cleaners, pet care, pest control and so on. Although mainly based in London and the South East, the company is expanding rapidly across the UK so should you be interested, don’t be put off getting in touch as representatives may be in your area.

I’m always suspicious about such operations as they are often very expensive. Fantastic, however, bucks the trend and is very reasonably priced. Regular domestic cleaning comes in at £12 an hour.

When the gardeners came round, the bar was set very high. Could Fantastic live up to our expectations a second time?

I received both a confirmation email and phone call. The two cleaners arrived on time in Fantastic uniforms and wore shoe covers when entering the house. The guys did a superb job leaving us very impressed.

As I said above, we used Fantastic a third time shortly afterwards. Rather unfortunately we experienced an infestation of cigarette beetle in our kitchen.

It was grim. These little beetles kept turning up all over the place; window sills, hob, work surface, cupboards, everywhere! I was desperately worried for two reasons; 1) that had I done something wrong on the domestic front allowing the beetles to thrive and 2) they were they some kind of wood-boring insect like death watch beetle?

This was a slightly different service. I received a confirmation phone call the day before and was given detailed instructions to leave the house with the children for several hours after it had been treated. This is necessary because insecticide is used inside the house. The exceedingly cheery pest controller turned up early, as the gardeners had done.

He reiterated the advice and after about 15 minutes of spraying insecticide around the property, the job was done. The treatment worked and the pest controller reassured me there was nothing we had done wrong on the domestic front. He reckoned all we’d done is bought a bag of flour from somewhere that was infested with the beetle (advice that was backed up following a display I saw on creepy crawlies at the Natural History Museum the other day).

To be on the safe side I threw out every bag of flour in the house. I replaced the flour and in line with advice from the pest controller, started to store the flour in air tight containers, not simply re-sealing the paper bags that flour usually comes in.

As far as we’re concerned, Fantastic Services has scored the hat-trick. We’ve been very impressed with its gardening, cleaning and pest control offering and probably will use the company again.

Disclosure; Some of Fantastic’s services were provided on a complimentary absis for review purposes. Thoughts and opinions entirely my own.