Move-In / Move-Out Cleaning in Northampton

Landlords and property managers check a short and remarkably consistent list: inside the oven, inside the refrigerator, inside cabinets and closets, bathroom grout and fixtures, baseboards, window tracks, light fixtures and floors. We clean to that list rather than to a general impression of tidiness, and we walk it again before we leave.

Older houses add their own items. A rental in a house built before 1940 -- and more than four in ten Northampton homes were -- can have more trim, more stairs and more built-in shelving than a newer unit, and radiators or baseboard heaters that hide dust behind them. We include those in the move-out scope rather than leaving them for the next tenant to find. Empty units get the best result, because we can reach every corner and every shelf. If you can schedule us after the truck leaves, do, and book well ahead for late summer and early fall, the busy season for cleaning here.

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

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, sills, tracks, trim and every floor in the place. In an older house we give the built-ins and the tops of door and window casings a proper pass, because that is where years of dust collect, and you are about to fill those shelves with your own things.

Five colleges sit in three of our towns: Smith College in Northampton, Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, and Amherst College, Hampshire College and UMass Amherst in Amherst. In Amherst, 37.7 percent of homes sit in buildings of five or more units, the highest share of the six places we cover. A shared apartment or house turns a move-out into a group job: several bedrooms, common rooms nobody owns, and a kitchen everybody used.

We clean houses and apartments off campus for tenants, groups and landlords alike. Tell us how many bedrooms there are, whether the common rooms are in scope, and the date you are working to, and we plan the job around it. Two limits, stated plainly: we do not clean on campus, and we do not promise any outcome on a deposit or an inspection -- those are a landlord's decisions. What we promise is the cleaning, against the list a walk-through looks at, checked before we leave.