Move-In Cleaning: Book It Before You Unpack

The window you are trying to protect

There is a stretch between the moment you can legally get in and the moment the truck backs up to the door. Sometimes it is three days. Sometimes it is ninety minutes on a Friday. Whatever it is, it is the window where every cabinet, closet, shelf, and floor in the house is reachable at once, with nothing to work around.

A move-in clean runs four to eight hours depending on the house, so the window has to be wide enough to hold one. If you know your closing date or your lease start, book the clean the same week you know it. The ends of months do fill up first, but the bigger reason is that the gap itself moves: it shrinks when the closing slides, when the truck comes a day early, or when a relative shows up with a car full of boxes to “get a head start.”

If the gap turns out to be zero, say so. We would rather clean an occupied house well than have you cancel the whole idea.

What to spend the empty hours on

An empty house changes the priority order. Put the time into the surfaces that are about to have something sitting on them.

Cabinet and closet interiors first. Kitchen cabinets, bathroom vanities, medicine cabinets, linen closets, bedroom closet shelves and rods. These are the surfaces you will put clean plates and folded clothes onto, they hold whatever the previous household left behind, and once they are full they are awkward to get back to.

Then the appliances that came with the house. Inside the oven, inside the fridge, and the dishwasher interior and its seals. On a move-in or move-out clean the oven and the fridge are part of the job rather than an add-on, for exactly this reason. We do not move appliances that are plumbed in. Tell us about areas behind appliances so we can confirm safe access.

Then floors, trim, and the parts of a room that get furniture parked against them. Baseboards, door frames, window sills and tracks, vents, light fixtures, ceiling fan blades. All of them are quicker to reach on an empty floor than around a sectional.

Bathrooms and the kitchen sink can wait, oddly enough. Those stay reachable on any ordinary Tuesday.

Telling your movers

Two sentences to the moving company will save the whole plan:

• Give them a start time rather than a window if you can, and give us the earlier half of the day.
• Tell them which rooms are being cleaned last, so the first load does not get stacked in one.

If both crews are going to be in the building at once, tell us at booking and we will tell you whether we can make it work on that date. Sometimes the answer is a split, upstairs while the truck unloads into the garage and then a swap. Sometimes the honest answer is that the day is too tight for a four-to-eight-hour clean and a better date exists. Either way it is a conversation before the booking is confirmed, not an assumption on the day.

Worth knowing: if the previous household has not finished moving out, nobody can do this properly. That is a normal thing to have happen and a normal thing to reschedule for.

A short pre-clean list for the new place

Nothing here is heavy. It is the difference between a good use of the window and a wasted one.

• Confirm the utilities are on in your name before the clean, especially water and power
• Have the keys, the code, or the lockbox sorted, and tell us which
• Point out anything already broken so nobody assumes it happened today
• Say if a room is going to be painted or floored after the clean, so the visit is not wasted on it; anything you want done once that work finishes is a second visit, booked separately
• Flag pets, if any are arriving mid-move

This is not the same job as a move-out

They share a service and they share a price, and after that they part company. A move-out clean is a handover: it is done for the next person, judged by someone at a walkthrough, and paced against a key exchange. A move-in clean is for you, and the deadline is a furniture truck.

If you are doing both ends of the same move, book them as two visits at two addresses. The checklist for the place you are leaving is here: the move-out cleaning checklist.

Booking around a closing date

A move-in clean of a three-bedroom, two-bath home is $359, a two-bedroom is $299, and a one-bedroom is $249. Price your own on the quote form, or look at the whole rate card first.

Closings move. Tell us when yours does and we will move with it if the day is still open. Give us as much notice as you have, particularly for the first or last week of a month, and if you are landing somewhere like Dublin, Westerville, or anywhere else across the Columbus metro we cover, the answer is the same: the earlier we know, the better the window we can hold.

Once you are in and unpacked, the ongoing version of this is a much smaller job. That is recurring house cleaning, and it is worth deciding about after a month in the house rather than during the move.