Move-out cleaning: what a landlord or a buyer actually checks

Moving is the worst possible time to be cleaning a house, which is exactly when everybody does it. At eleven at night, with the van booked for eight, having already carried furniture for nine hours.

If you are going to do it yourself, at least do it in the right order. Here is what the person coming after you actually looks at, based on the places people always miss.

Nobody checks the middle of the floor

The middle of a room is the one part that has been swept a hundred times. It is fine. It has always been fine.

Inspections are made of a small number of specific places, and they are the same places every time:

The oven. First thing opened, in every single inspection, by every landlord and most buyers. If you do one thing on this list, do this one.

The fridge. Seals, the salad drawer, and underneath the drawers where things have leaked and been forgotten.

Under the kitchen sink. The cupboard nobody has looked in for two years. Sticky rings from bottles, a bit of grit, sometimes a slow leak that has quietly stained the base and that you would genuinely rather find now than have someone else find.

Inside cupboards and drawers. All of them, empty, wiped out. Crumbs in the bottom of a kitchen drawer are the single most common note on a move-out list.

The bathroom, at the joins. Not the tiles. The silicone around the bath, the base of the toilet where it meets the floor, the plughole, the shower door track.

Windowsills and window tracks. The gritty channel the window slides in. Almost nobody cleans it and almost everybody runs a finger along it.

Behind and under the appliances. Whatever comes out comes out. If the fridge and the stove are moving, the floor underneath them is now visible and it will not look like the rest of the floor.

Light switches, door handles, door frames. Hand height and above head height. The two bands of a house that get touched constantly and cleaned rarely.

Extractor fans and vents. Bathroom fan covers and the kitchen hood filter. Grey and fluffy in almost every home.

The order that saves you time

Top to bottom, and empty first.

1. Empty completely. Do not start cleaning around boxes. Everything you clean around, you will clean again.
2. Dust and wipe high. Light fittings, tops of door frames, vents, the tops of cupboards.
3. Kitchen. Oven, fridge, inside every cupboard, then surfaces.
4. Bathrooms. Joins and plugholes before tiles.
5. Windows, sills and tracks.
6. Floors last. All of them, everything that came off the walls and out of the cupboards has landed there.

Doing floors first is the most common mistake and it costs you an hour.

What this costs to hand over

We do move-out and move-in cleans across Simcoe County and Muskoka. The price depends on the size of the home and the state it is in, so we quote the actual house rather than publishing a rate card that would be wrong for most of them.

What is worth weighing is what your own time is worth on that particular day. A move-out clean on an empty house is a lot faster for a crew than for one exhausted person at midnight, because everything is reachable, there is nothing to work around and there are several of us. If you are handing keys back in the morning, that difference is usually the whole argument.

One practical note if you are renting in Ontario: a landlord cannot deduct for normal wear and tear, only for damage or for genuine uncleanliness. Photographs on the day you hand the keys over are worth taking either way, and they are worth taking after the clean rather than before.

Move-in is the one people skip

Cleaning a house you are moving into feels optional, because it looks fine. It usually is fine. But it is also the only time in your entire tenure that the place will be completely empty, and that is worth something.

Inside every cupboard, behind where the fridge will go, the tops of the kitchen units, the window tracks, the bathroom joins. All of it is reachable on that one day and none of it will be reachable again until you leave. It is a couple of hours that pays for itself over years, and it is a genuinely nicer way to start in a house than wondering about the previous owners.

If you would rather not

Send us the details of the house and we will quote it. Empty or not yet empty, moving out or moving in.

• Get a price for your home
• Or call and talk it through with someone. Moving dates move, and we would rather be told than turn up to a house that still has a sofa in it.

We are the home-cleaning division of Home Service Hunks, so it is the same company, the same insurance and the same standard, with a crew of its own who only do homes. And if the move has left you with the outside to think about as well, the Hunks handle the windows and gutters.