Move-In / Move-Out Cleaning

A move-out clean is judged by somebody else. A landlord, a property manager, a housing office, a buyer walking through with a list, or a closing walkthrough. That makes it a fundamentally different job from cleaning your own home, where you set the standard.

The lists people get handed here are short and remarkably consistent: inside the oven, inside the refrigerator, inside cabinets and closet shelves, bathroom grout and fixtures, baseboards, window tracks and sills, light fixtures and fan blades, vent covers, and the garage floor. We clean to that list rather than to a general impression of tidiness, and we walk it again before we leave.

Empty units get the best result, because we can reach every corner, every closet shelf and behind every appliance. If you can schedule us after the truck leaves, do. Book at least a week out for an ordinary move, and further ahead if your date falls in the summer, when this whole market turns over at once.

Move-in cleaning is the opposite problem. Nobody is grading it -- you simply do not want to unpack into somebody else's grime. The previous occupant's idea of clean usually stopped at eye level, and whatever the place collected while it sat empty is still there.

In a humid climate a house that has been closed up for a few weeks is not just dusty. Bathrooms and anything with a seal need real attention before you move a toothbrush in, closets hold whatever the air left in them, and the cabinets you are about to fill and the appliances you are about to put food in deserve better than a wipe. We do all of it before the furniture arrives: inside every cabinet and drawer, inside the appliances, bathroom fixtures and grout, closet shelving, ceiling fans, vent covers, sills, tracks and every floor in the place.

If you have just driven in from somewhere else and the house is the last thing you want to think about, this is the visit that buys back a weekend.

A PCS cleaning service is a move-out clean written for somebody holding orders, a report date and an inspection appointment rather than somebody who just found a bigger place. The difference is not the cleaning. It is the scheduling, the sequence and the fact that the date is not negotiable.

More than 52,000 military personnel are assigned to Fort Bragg. Families here move on a calendar set elsewhere, the summer window bunches those moves together, and every one of them ends with somebody walking the house against a list. So we ask for the inspection date first and build backward from it, we plan the job around an empty house rather than a partly packed one, and we finish with a walkthrough against the same kind of list you were handed.

One limit, stated plainly rather than discovered at a gate: we do not clean on post. On-post housing runs through Corvias, behind base access we have not established, and we are not affiliated with, endorsed by or contracted to the Army in any way. What we do cover is every civilian address in this market -- which, because Fayetteville annexed 85 percent of the installation in 2008, is most of what people mean when they talk about living out there. Spring Lake, whose town limits reach Fort Bragg and Pope Field, is the same story: civilian addresses yes, on post no.