We clean inside every cabinet before check-in

We clean top to bottom between guests

The first thing we do in an empty rental is walk every room before we clean anything. We look under the beds and inside the closets. That walk tells us what the last guests left behind and whether anything got broken during the stay. Then the beds get stripped and the trash comes out of every room, so we are not cleaning around dirty sheets.

After the walk we work from high to low. Ceiling fans and the tops of the kitchen cabinets get dusted first, because that dust drifts down onto whatever is under it. In the kitchen, anything guests left in the fridge goes out and every shelf gets wiped. We open each cabinet and drawer and wipe the inside, since guests open every one of them looking for a pan or a corkscrew. The microwave and the oven get cleaned on the inside, where the last guest's splatter sits.

Bathrooms come next. Toilets get scrubbed under the rim and around the base, where hair collects and shows up against the white porcelain. Shower glass and faucets get wiped dry after they are scrubbed. Then the beds are made with fresh sheets and clean towels get set out. Floors are the last thing we touch. We vacuum and mop from the back of the house toward the front door, so nobody walks across a clean floor on the way out.

• Inside of every cabinet and drawer wiped
• Fridge emptied and every shelf wiped
• Microwave and oven cleaned on the inside
• Beds stripped and made with fresh sheets
• Floors vacuumed and mopped on the way out

Guests check the places cleaners skip

A guest walking into a rental does something a homeowner never does. They open everything. They pull out the silverware drawer and look in the bathroom drawers for a hair dryer. A crumb in the silverware tray tells them nobody cleaned in there. So does a ring of old coffee in the pot. Then they start wondering what else the cleaner missed in the rest of the house.

When a step gets skipped, the guest usually finds it before they unpack. Hair is the big one. A single hair on a pillowcase or in the shower drain makes the whole house look dirty, even when the rest is spotless. The same goes for a sticky spot on a fridge shelf where someone set down a juice bottle. Guests write about those things in their reviews, and a rental with bad reviews sits empty.

So the last thing we do before we leave is walk the house again, this time the way a guest would. We pull back the covers on each bed and look into the shower from the doorway. Anything we would not want to find as a guest gets cleaned again right then. If the first walk turned up damage or something a guest left behind, you hear about it from us. That way it is not a surprise in a message from your next guest.

Boise weather adds work inside the house

Boise is high desert country, and the air is dry most of the year. Dust blows in off the hills around the valley and settles on every flat surface. A rental that sits empty for a week between bookings collects a fine gray layer on the tables and window sills. Guests notice it the moment sunlight comes through the glass. That is why we dust before every stay, even when the last guests barely used a room.

The water around Boise is hard, and it leaves white mineral spots on anything it dries on. Shower glass and chrome faucets take the worst of it. Spots from one stay wipe right off. Skip them for a few stays and they build into a crust that a quick wipe will not move. After that the glass looks cloudy even when it is clean. We scrub the glass and the fixtures, then dry them by hand, so the water never gets the chance to leave a spot.

Each season brings a different mess. In winter, guests track in snow and road gravel, and the melt dries into gritty marks inside the front door. Late summer can bring wildfire smoke, which leaves a haze on window glass and a smell in couch cushions. Rentals near the Boise River in Garden City get cottonwood fluff in early summer. It packs into window screens and sliding door tracks, so we vacuum those tracks out during that stretch of the year.

The type of house changes the work

Many rentals near downtown Boise are in the North End, in older wood-frame and brick houses with original hardwood floors. Old hardwood does not handle water well. We clean it with a damp mop, never a wet one, because water that sits in the seams swells the boards and dulls the finish. Old windows have deep sills, and those sills collect dust and dead bugs that a guest can see from the bed. Plenty of these houses also have a basement bedroom, and it gets the same care as the rooms upstairs.

Newer rentals in Meridian and Eagle tend to be wood-frame houses in subdivisions, with open kitchens that run straight into the living room. In an open floor plan, crumbs travel. What falls off the kitchen island ends up under the couch across the room. So we pull the cushions and vacuum the couch and the floor under it. Many of these houses have vinyl plank floors downstairs and carpet in the bedrooms. The plank gets a damp mop, and the carpet gets vacuumed in straight rows so a guest can see it was done.

Townhomes and condos in Garden City and downtown Boise are smaller, but they take more care than the size suggests. Stairs catch hair and grit on every step and along the edge where the carpet meets the wall. We vacuum that edge with a crevice tool, since a regular vacuum head misses it. A balcony or patio collects the same dust as the window sills. We sweep it and wipe down the chairs, because that is where a guest sits with coffee the first morning.