Move-In / Move-Out Cleaning

The previous occupant's idea of clean usually stopped at eye level, and whatever the property collected while it sat vacant is still there. In this climate a house that has been empty for a few weeks has more than dust in it: humidity has been sitting in the closed rooms, the bathrooms have gone stale, and the tracks and vents are worse than the floors suggest.

We do this before your furniture arrives: inside every cabinet and drawer, inside the appliances you are about to put food in, bathroom fixtures and grout, closet shelving, ceiling fans, vents, sills, slider tracks and every floor in the place. It is a few hours of work that saves you from discovering the state of the kitchen drawers after the boxes are already stacked in front of them.

A brand-new house is its own category, and this market has thousands of them. Builder cleans are quick by design, and what they leave behind shows up over the following weeks: drywall dust working back out of vents and light fixtures, grit on the tops of cabinets and door frames, sticker residue on appliances and glass, construction dust in the air handler that redistributes every time the system runs, and grout that has never been properly cleaned or sealed.

We do the pass a builder clean does not: vents and registers, fan blades and fixtures, cabinet tops and interiors, window and slider tracks, appliance interiors, grout, and the floors twice. Do it before the furniture goes in if you can. New arrivals in Tradition, Southern Grove and Riverland are the households we do this for most often.

Landlords, property managers and closing agents check a remarkably consistent short list: inside the oven, inside the refrigerator, inside cabinets and closet shelves, bathroom grout, baseboards, window and slider tracks, light fixtures and the garage floor. We clean to that list rather than to a general impression of tidiness, because that list is what decides whether you see your deposit again.

Empty units get the best result because we can reach every corner, so if you can schedule us after the truck leaves, do. Book at least a week out. And if you are selling rather than renting, tell us -- a pre-listing clean and a move-out clean overlap heavily but they are graded by very different people.