We clean inside every cabinet and closet

An empty house shows every missed spot

Move out cleaning happens after the furniture and boxes are gone, and that changes the job. Every spot a couch covered for years is now in plain view. So is the dust line where a dresser stood, and the scuffs the dolly left in the hallway. We clean what a lived-in house hides. That means inside cabinets and drawers, inside the oven and fridge, closet shelves, window tracks, and the baseboards behind where the bed was.

Move in cleaning is the same work, done for the person arriving instead of the one leaving. The last people out may have cleaned, or they may have swept and handed over the keys. Before your boxes come through the door, we wipe the shelves your dishes will sit on and clean out the fridge your food goes into. The bathrooms get scrubbed too, since you will use them the first night. Unpacking into a clean kitchen is a lot easier than cleaning around stacked boxes.

Done right, a move clean holds up to the walkthrough a landlord or a buyer does at the end. Many of them start by opening the oven. Then they pull out a drawer and run a finger along the bottom. After that they look up at the fan blades and down at the floor vents. A quick sweep and mop skips every one of those spots. We check them before we call the house done.

• Inside of every cabinet and drawer wiped
• Oven and fridge cleaned inside and out
• Bathrooms scrubbed, including behind the toilet
• Window tracks and sills vacuumed, then wiped
• Baseboards wiped, then floors vacuumed and mopped

We clean from the ceiling down

On a move clean we work from the ceiling down, because an empty room shows everything that falls. The first pass is up high, on ceiling fans and the tops of the kitchen cabinets, where years of dust and grease sit out of sight. That dust lands on the counters and the floor. Counters and cabinet fronts get cleaned next. The floors wait until everything above them is finished.

The oven and the fridge go early, even though they look like the last chore. Baked-on grease needs a degreaser left to sit before it wipes off. A fridge that was unplugged for the move often has a puddle and a smell under the crisper drawers. Starting those first gives them time to soak and dry while we work through the rest of the kitchen. Skip the wait and you end up scraping, which can scratch the oven glass.

Bathrooms come after the kitchen. Soap scum on a tub and the ring inside a toilet both need time with a cleaner before scrubbing, the same as oven grease. Then come the baseboards and window tracks. The floors are last, and we mop our way back out of each room toward the front door. Mop before the baseboards are wiped and you mop twice, because the baseboard dust lands right on the wet floor.

Nashville weather is hard on empty houses

A house that sits empty in a Nashville summer changes fast. Owners and landlords often set the thermostat high or shut the air off to save money, and the humidity moves in. After a couple of weeks you can smell it in the closets and under the bathroom sink. Mildew shows up as small gray spots on the caulk and on the back wall of a shower nobody is running.

So on a summer move we deal with the closed-up spaces first. Closet shelves and the inside of the bathroom vanity get wiped with a cleaner that kills mildew. Plain water on a rag only spreads it around. We run the bathroom fan while we work and leave the cabinet doors open to dry. If the smell is coming from the carpet or the drywall, cleaning will not fix it, and we will tell you so.

Spring moves bring a different mess. Middle Tennessee pollen settles as yellow dust on window sills and in sliding door tracks. A house that stood open all day for the movers gets a coat of it inside too. Rainy moving days bring in clay on boots and dolly wheels, and it dries in the grout lines by the door. Grout needs a scrub brush, because a mop just smears clay into a thin muddy film.

Old and new houses need different care

A lot of Nashville's housing is brick ranches built in the middle of the last century. The older neighborhoods closer to downtown also have bungalows with their original oak floors. Those floors have gaps between the boards that hold years of grit. We vacuum the gaps before anything wet touches the wood. Too much water on old oak runs down between the boards, and the board edges start to curl up.

Many of those ranches still have their original tile bathrooms, with colored tile and grout lines that have gone dark over the years. A scrub brush and time with a cleaner bring a lot of that grout back to a lighter shade. Some of it is stained all the way through, though, and no amount of scrubbing changes that. We will point those spots out, so the walkthrough holds no surprises.

Newer homes bring their own problems. The tall, narrow new houses going up all over Nashville have two or three floors each. Every stair tread collects dust in the back corners, where a vacuum head does not reach, so we do stairs by hand. Apartments and new townhomes usually have flat builder paint on the walls, and flat paint marks if you scrub it. We spot clean those walls with a soft cloth.