We clean every cabinet inside and out

An empty house shows every missed spot

A move out clean is a different job from a weekly visit. Once the furniture is gone, you see the gray line of dust where a dresser stood. You see the grease film on the wall behind the stove too. The rooms look bigger and dirtier at the same time. A buyer or a landlord walks through with the lights on and the shades up, and anything we skip is the first thing they notice.

We work from the top of each room down to the floor. Ceiling corners and light fixtures come first, then the tops of door frames. Whatever we knock loose falls onto surfaces we have not cleaned yet. Next come the insides of the cabinets and drawers, wiped out and left open to air dry. Floors go last. We back out of each room as we finish it, so nobody walks across a clean floor to reach a dirty one.

The kitchen takes the longest. We clean inside the oven and the refrigerator. Then we wipe the tops of the cabinets, where cooking grease and dust dry into a sticky layer. In the bathrooms we scrub the tub and the grout lines and clean the toilet all the way down to the base. Those two rooms decide how the whole house feels to the next person who opens a cabinet door.

• Inside every cabinet, drawer and closet shelf
• Inside the oven and the refrigerator
• Baseboards, sills and door frames wiped down
• Tubs, toilets, tile and vanities scrubbed
• Floors vacuumed and washed, last in every room

A move in clean comes before unpacking

The easiest time to clean a house is before your things arrive. Once the boxes are stacked in the kitchen and the beds are set up, nobody reaches the upper cabinets for months. A move in clean means you can put dishes straight onto the shelves without lining them first. The bathroom gets a real scrub too, which the last owner rarely has time for on the way out the door.

Diane Roth put it this way in a Google review: “We needed help with cleaning before we moved into our house. My husband and I were very happy with the service provided!” A house can look fine on the walkthrough. It can still have a sticky refrigerator shelf and dust thick on the tops of the kitchen cabinets. You notice it the first night you cook, and by then the cabinets are full.

A move out clean is for the people leaving. Renters want the place ready for the landlord's final walkthrough, and sellers want the house ready for the buyer's walkthrough before closing. Either way the rooms are empty and the time is short, often squeezed between the moving truck and the handoff of keys. We clean it the same way for both, because a landlord and a buyer both open the oven and both look under the sink.

Winter sand and salt end up indoors

Houses around Bellingham spend months with the windows shut and the heat running. Sand and road salt come in on boots all winter and settle into the front entry and the carpet along the path to the kitchen. On hardwood, dried salt leaves a white haze that a dry mop only pushes around. It comes off with a damp cloth and plain warm water, followed by a dry pass so no water sits in the seams between the boards.

A lot of houses here heat with hot water baseboard units, and the fins inside those covers collect dust and pet hair all winter. When the heat comes on in the fall, that dust burns off and the whole house smells like it. An empty house is the easiest time to deal with it, since no couch is pushed against the wall. We wipe the covers and vacuum between the fins wherever we can reach them.

Summer brings the opposite problem. Humid air in closed-up rooms lets mildew grow on bathroom ceilings and in the corners of the shower tile. Window tracks hold the black grime left by condensation that ran down the glass all winter. A house that sat empty on the market for a few weeks can smell musty by the time you get the keys. So we clean the tracks and the tile, and we leave the bathroom fan running while we work.

Older capes and raised ranches take longer

Bellingham has a lot of older capes and raised ranches, along with newer colonials in the subdivisions. A cape has sloped ceilings and knee walls upstairs, and dust collects on the flat ledge where the slope meets the wall. The closets tucked under the eaves run deep and dark, and nobody has cleaned the back of them since the last move. We bring a light and reach all the way in, because that is where the dust and cobwebs pile up.

A raised ranch splits the house across two short flights of stairs, with the lower level partly below ground. That lower level is often a finished family room, and it runs cooler and damper than the rest of the house. Carpet down there holds onto the dampness and the smell that comes with it. We vacuum it slowly, corners included, and we tell you if any spot on the carpet or the wall looks like water came in.

Newer colonials have their own trouble spots. A tall front entry puts the light fixture and the ledge over the door out of reach from the floor. That is why they get skipped so often. Open kitchens let cooking grease drift farther than people expect, onto the tops of the cabinets and the ceiling above the range. The staircase gets every tread vacuumed and the edges wiped by hand, because the stairs are the first thing a new owner sees.