We clean inside every cabinet and closet

An empty room shows every missed spot

Once the furniture is gone, a room has nowhere to hide. The outline of a bed frame stays pressed into the carpet. The wall behind a dresser has a gray band at hand height. The dust that sat under the couch for years is now in the middle of the floor. A move in or move out clean is built for that moment. The place is empty, and someone is about to walk through it with a checklist.

We work from the top down and from the inside out. Cabinets and closets come first. Every shelf and drawer gets wiped inside, along with the closet rods and the shelf above them. That is where the next person puts their things on the first night. Then we go around each room wiping light switches and door frames, and spot cleaning the walls where hands and chair backs rubbed them. Bathrooms and the kitchen come next. The floors are done last, room by room, backing out toward the front door.

Skip the order and you end up cleaning twice. Wipe the counters before the upper cabinets and the crumbs from the top shelves land on a clean surface. Mop before the baseboards and the dust you knock loose lands on a wet floor, where it dries into streaks. A move out clean also gets judged in a different way than a regular clean. Nobody opens your kitchen drawers during a dinner party, but a landlord doing a walk through opens every one of them.

• Every cabinet and drawer wiped inside
• Closet shelves and rods wiped down
• Window sills and slider tracks vacuumed
• Kitchen grease and shower hard water removed
• Baseboards wiped, floors cleaned last

Kitchens and bathrooms take the most time

The kitchen is where most of the hours go. Cooking grease floats up and settles on the cabinet doors around the stove, then catches dust and turns into a sticky brown film. It builds so slowly that people living with it stop seeing it. In an empty kitchen with the overhead light on, it is the first thing anyone notices. We degrease the cabinet faces and the range hood, and clean inside the oven and the fridge when they stay with the home.

Water across most of Los Angeles is hard, and it leaves a white mineral crust wherever it dries. You see it around the base of a faucet and as a haze across shower glass. A regular wipe does nothing to it once it has built up. It has to be softened with an acid cleaner and left to sit before it will scrub off. The glass then needs a thorough rinse, or it dries cloudy again. A foggy shower door is one of the first things a landlord points to on a walk through.

Plenty of rentals around Los Angeles still have their original bathroom tile, with small hexagon tile on the floor and square tile on the walls. That means a lot of grout, and grout soaks things up. Soap and body oil settle into it and turn it gray. Closer to the ocean, in Santa Monica and the west side, the damp marine air adds mildew in the corners of the shower. We scrub the grout lines by hand and clean behind the toilet, where a mop never reaches.

Dry winds pack dust into window tracks

Southern California can go months without real rain, and in the fall the Santa Ana winds blow hot and dry out of the desert. Fine dust rides in through every gap around a window or door. It settles on the sills and inside the tracks of sliding windows, where it packs into a gray grit. A quick wipe only smears it around. We vacuum the tracks first and then scrub them, so the windows slide clean when the next person opens them.

Much of the rental housing here is stucco apartment buildings with the parking tucked underneath, plus older Spanish style and Craftsman bungalows on the side streets. The apartments usually have aluminum slider windows and vertical blinds, and every slat of those blinds holds its own line of dust. The bungalows tend to have hardwood floors and a wall heater in the hallway, and the heater grille collects lint all winter. Each kind of building has its own dust traps, and we check them before the walk through finds them.

Floors come last, and each type needs its own care. Old hardwood gets a barely damp mop, never a wet one, because water that sits in the seams makes the boards swell and cup. Kitchen tile and vinyl get scrubbed along the edges, where a mop usually skips. On carpet we vacuum all the way to the baseboard. Dust from the whole room drifts to the walls and leaves a dark line along the edge.

A clean unit helps protect your deposit

In California, a landlord can take cleaning costs out of a security deposit. The limit is what it takes to bring the unit back to how clean it was at move in. So the standard is the condition you moved into, not perfection. The landlord still decides what counts as dirty, and cleaning is an easy charge to put on a deduction list. A unit that is clean inside the cabinets and the appliances leaves very little to write down.

California also lets a tenant ask for an inspection before moving out, so problems get pointed out while there is still time to fix them. If you get that list, send it to us when you book and we clean to it, item by item. Either way, take photos of every room once we finish, including the inside of the cabinets and the fridge. Photos from the last day are the best record you have if a deduction shows up later.

A move in clean is the same work, done for the person arriving instead of the person leaving. The last tenant or the seller may have left the place looking fine from the doorway. Open the kitchen drawers and you find crumbs, and the shelf above the closet rod still holds someone else's dust. Before your boxes arrive is the only time every surface is easy to reach. Once the dishes are in the cabinets and the bed is against the wall, those spots stay dirty until you move out.