We clean empty homes top to bottom

We clean after the boxes are gone

A move out clean starts up high and finishes at the front door. We dust the ceiling fans and light fixtures first, along with the tops of the kitchen cabinets. Dust knocked loose up there lands on the counters and the floor, so those wait. Then the kitchen gets done from the inside out: every cabinet and drawer, then the oven and the fridge. The bathrooms follow, then the baseboards. The floors are last, and we mop our way out of each room so nobody walks on a clean floor.

When the job is finished, you can run a finger along the top of a door frame and it comes away clean. The same goes for the lip of a pantry shelf and the top edge of every baseboard. The oven shows bare enamel instead of a brown crust. The drawers have no crumbs packed into the corners, and the fridge smells like nothing at all. Those are the spots a landlord or a buyer's agent checks first, because they are the spots most people forget.

Skipping the order is where move out cleans go wrong. Mop the kitchen before the cabinets are wiped out, and the crumbs land on a floor that was already done. Dust the light over the bathroom sink after wiping the counter, and the dust lands right back on it. The most common miss is inside the cabinets. People wipe the doors and never open them. A property manager opens every one. One sticky shelf can show up as a cleaning charge on your final statement.

• Inside every cabinet and drawer wiped out
• Oven and fridge cleaned inside and out
• Bathrooms scrubbed, hard water spots included
• Baseboards and door frames wiped by hand
• Floors vacuumed and mopped on the way out

Empty rooms show what the furniture hid

Once the couch and the dressers are gone, a room looks dirtier than it did the day before. There is a gray line on the baseboard where the couch sat. There are scuffs on the wall at the height of a chair back, and a dusty outline where a rug used to be. None of that showed with the furniture in place. The whole house has to be looked at again, empty, before anyone calls it clean.

The kitchen hides the most. Grease settles on top of the fridge and on the range hood, where nobody looks while they live there. Crumbs collect in the strip of floor beside the stove. Closets collect dust on the top shelf and along the floor at the back wall. Window tracks and the sliding door track fill with grit and dead bugs. We clean all of those, because an empty house puts every one of them in plain sight.

Most moves end with a walkthrough. A landlord or property manager walks the empty rooms with a checklist. On a home sale, the buyer usually walks through once more before closing. If your landlord gave you a move out checklist, tell us what is on it when you book. We work from the same list they will use. Some leases ask for every blind slat to be wiped, and others care most about the oven. You want to know which one you have before moving day.

Boise dust and hard water need extra work

Boise is dry high desert, and dry air moves a lot of dust. Spring wind carries fine grit through every gap around a window. In a lived-in house, you dust the sills now and then and never look at the tracks. When the curtains come down on moving day, the tracks are full. Late summer can bring wildfire smoke, which leaves a gray film on window glass and on the tops of doors. So we vacuum the window tracks before we wipe them, or the grit turns to mud on the cloth.

The water across much of the Treasure Valley is hard, and it shows in the bathrooms. Every shower leaves a little mineral on the glass and around the base of the faucet. Over a lease or two, it builds into a white crust. Regular spray cleaner slides right over it. Mineral needs a cleaner made for it, and that cleaner needs time sitting on the glass before any scrubbing starts. Rush that step and the glass looks clean while it is wet, then dries cloudy an hour later.

The time of year changes the job too. A winter move brings snowmelt and road sand in on every boot, and it all ends up on the entry floor and the stairs. A spring move brings mud. If the movers are still carrying boxes, we leave the entry and the hallway for the very end. Cleaning them first means cleaning them twice, because the last trips out to the truck walk right across them. Carpet on the stairs takes the worst of it, so it gets vacuumed after everything else.

Newer and older homes need different care

A lot of the houses in Meridian and Kuna are newer wood frame homes in subdivisions. Most have builder-grade paint on the walls, usually a flat finish. That paint marks easily, and it does not take scrubbing well. Rub a scuff too hard and you leave a shiny patch that looks worse than the mark did. We test a small spot first and use a soft cloth. Some marks need a paint touch up instead, and we will tell you which ones before you hand over the keys.

Those newer homes usually have vinyl plank flooring downstairs and carpet in the bedrooms. Vinyl plank looks easy, but it streaks if it is mopped the wrong way. Too much water sits in the seams, and a cleaner that leaves residue goes dull under the first footprints. We mop with a damp pad and a light cleaner, working along the length of the boards so the floor dries evenly. On carpet, the part people miss is the edge along the walls, where dust from the whole house settles.

Older Boise houses bring different problems. The North End has bungalows with wood floors and trim that has been painted over many times. On the Bench there are ranch houses, some still with older tile in the bathrooms. Old wood floors do not handle a wet mop, so we use a barely damp mop and dry the boards as we go. Old grout often holds stains that no scrubbing will lift. When something is worn out instead of dirty, we tell you before the walkthrough so it is not a surprise.

Your new house gets cleaned before unloading

Moving in is the one time the whole house is empty and every shelf is easy to reach. The previous owner or tenant may have cleaned, but you do not know how well. We wipe the inside of every kitchen cabinet and drawer before your dishes go in. We clean inside the fridge and the oven so your first meal is not cooked on somebody else's grease. Then the bathrooms get scrubbed, and the floors get done before the first box crosses them.

The best time for a move in clean is the gap between getting the keys and the truck showing up. A single empty day makes a big difference. Once the furniture is in, the work slows down, because everything has to be cleaned around and the cabinets are already full. If your move out and move in land in the same week, we can clean both houses. The old one gets done after it empties, and the new one gets done before it fills.

A few things need to be ready for either clean. The water and the power need to be on, with the water heater running, because cold water does not cut kitchen grease. The house should be empty, or close to it. Anything left inside a cabinet stays where it is, so clear the cabinets out if you want them cleaned inside. Lockboxes and door codes work fine, as long as we have the code before the day of the clean. Power matters for the lights too, since an empty house has no lamps and closets can be dark.