My name is Matt. For 25+ years I've run Shining Windows, a small exterior-cleaning business, with my partner Cass — windows, gutters and render, serving homes and businesses across Northamptonshire, Milton Keynes and Bedford. It's how we support our family and our two young girls.

Since May, the work van and all of our equipment — the pumps, hoses, water tank and specialist kit our livelihood runs on — have been unlawfully retained in a dispute and kept from us. In one action by a bad-faith actor we lost the tools of our trade and our only vehicle, right at the start of summer 2026, our busiest and most important earning season. We haven't been able to take on work, we've had to refund customers, and we've had no income coming in since May.

I'm severely disabled — I live with a serious spinal condition and multiple other health conditions — and losing the van took away both my independence and my livelihood. It's been the hardest stretch of our lives. There have been days we've gone without so our girls could eat, and the stress has landed me in hospital more than once. We've only kept our heads above water because our local community has rallied round us — feeding our family with supermarket vouchers and kindness so the children didn't go without. We've kept going, kept everything above board, and we're pursuing it properly through the County Court — but that takes time we don't have, and we are desperate to get back out working again.

Thanks to the kindness of one incredible person, we now have a replacement van on the drive. What we can't afford is to kit it out so it can actually earn: a baffled water tank and frame, pumps, hoses and reels, and the right heavy-load tyres to carry it safely. That's what this £5,000 is for — everything we need to replace the equipment we spent years building up, get back out working, and stand on our own two feet again.

Every pound goes straight into getting the business running, and we've listed the full shopping breakdown for complete transparency. Our aim is simple: to turn our community's kindness back into an income, and then to repay it. Any money left over, or any kindness we can't repay directly, we'll pay forward to someone else in need — that's a promise. We genuinely look forward to repaying our community with free window cleaning and pressure washing, as and when we can.

Full transparency — see exactly what your money buys

We've documented our shopping list, with screenshots of the actual baskets, on our website at shiningwindows.co.uk. The core kit comes to £3,271.64 across five UK suppliers, every one of which you can check for yourself: Window Cleaning Warehouse, Baileys WFP Systems, equip2clean, eBay, and Leather Vanseat Covers. (The water-tank order rises a little once VAT is added at checkout.)

The rest of the £5,000 covers the essentials that don't show up neatly on a product page: the cleaning fluids and smaller equipment we lost with the van; a split-charge relay and a second leisure battery so the water pump can run all day; and — the big one — professional installation of the water tank and cage, bolted safely through the floor with heavy-duty steel spacer plates (around £300–£500). A little also goes on fuel, sand and pressure-washer petrol to get the first jobs done, and GoFundMe takes a small fee from each donation. Every pound is accounted for, and we'll keep the breakdown updated on our website as we buy.

Thank you for reading, and for anything at all you can give. It means more than we can say.

— Matt & Cass, Shining Windows