Visit during stage 1

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Hi, we are entering stage 1 and will have a social worker visit in person. We are naturally a bit messy and will so a big tidy but anything I should pay attention to? We have some mould around seals round a window, and a bit of mould on a roller blind, do these things need sorting? Anyone just have a big cleaning list eg I thought make sure the fridge is clean!

It's a job interview for the job of therapeutic parent. You need to present your best selves at this point.

I would do a massive clean, but also consider how you're going to keep that up, including adding a traumatised child who needs calm and clean order, but creates chaos and dirt, into the mix.

Yes do a big tidy but personally I really wouldn't worry now about a bit of mould or cleaning the fridge! It will vary between professionals but our social worker was pretty respectful about coming into our home, she'd never have asked to see in the fridge for example and she always teetered on the edge of our bedroom rather than going in! Even though we said she was welcome to. They might be looking out for things if there were particular concerns but the first visit won't be an inspection.
We got into the habit of tidying up every time we had a visit and then felt we had to keep that up, in retrospect we could have let it go a bit. Our social worker kept asking how we'd cope with a child's mess when our home was so tidy, but we'd just ended up giving the impression of being tidier than we were most of the time.

They will tell you what they think needs doing. Just do it. A lot of the problems are more about how you respond to their requests.

Stage 1 the home visit was more just checking you had enough bedrooms, working boiler, nothing glaringly obvious that was a danger, e.g. if you had a garden pond etc.
Stage 2 was when they started looking in more detail etc