There is a right order to cleaning an empty house, and almost nobody uses it. The instinct is to start with the kitchen because the kitchen looks worst. Then you clean the floors, then you wipe the cabinets, and the dust from the cabinets lands on the floors you just did.
Work top down, and back to front
Gravity does most of the work if you let it. Start at the ceiling and finish at the floor. Start at the far corner of the house and finish at the door you are leaving through. You should never walk back across a finished surface.
An empty property finishes better than an occupied one. If there is any way to get the last of the furniture out before the clean, take it.
The order
- Empty everything. Cabinets, closets, the garage, the shed. Anything left behind is something you will have to work around later.
- Ceilings and high work. Fans, light fixtures, vents, spider webs and the tops of door frames. All of it drops.
- Windows, blinds and sills. Blinds dropped and wiped, tracks vacuumed out, sills scrubbed.
- Appliance interiors. Oven, refrigerator, dishwasher, microwave. These take the longest and they need dwell time, so start them early and come back.
- Cabinets, inside then out. Inside first, so the crumbs you knock loose land on a cabinet front you have not done yet.
- Bathrooms. Product on, leave it, come back. Descaling is a chemistry problem, not a scrubbing problem.
- Walls, trim, doors and switch plates. The part everyone skips and every landlord checks.
- Base boards. By hand, on your knees. There is no shortcut and it is the single biggest visual difference in an empty room.
- Floors, last. Vacuum everything, then mop your way out of the house.
- Garage sweep and the final walk. Walk it once with the lights on and once with them off, using the window light. You will see different things.
What gets you the deposit back
In our experience, inspections come down to five things: appliance interiors, the inside of cabinets, base boards, bathroom scale, and whether anything was left behind. A house can be perfectly clean and still fail on the last one.
If the closing date is tight, that is exactly the situation our move in and move out service exists for. Give us the walkthrough date and we schedule backwards from it.
