We clean your home once it's empty

An empty house shows every missed spot

A house that people live in hides a lot of dirt. The sofa sat on the same patch of tile for years, and the fridge kept a layer of grease and dust behind it out of sight. Once the rooms are empty, all of that is out in the open. It is the first thing the next person sees when they walk in. So a move out clean starts with the spots nobody has touched since the last move.

We work from the top of each room down. Ceiling fan blades, light fixtures, the tops of the upper cabinets and the ceiling vent covers come first. Anything we knock loose up there lands on the floor. Next come the insides of the cabinets and drawers, then the baseboards and door frames. The floors go last, including the strips along the walls where the furniture stood for years.

Done right, you can run a finger along the bottom of any drawer and it comes away clean. The tile along the walls matches the tile in the middle of the room. The patch where the fridge sat is no darker than the rest of the floor. Those are the places a landlord or a buyer checks first on a walkthrough, and they are where a rushed clean shows.

• Inside every cabinet and drawer, wiped out
• Floors cleaned where the furniture stood
• Range hood and filter degreased
• Bathrooms cleaned with a disinfectant cleaner
• Dryer vent run cleared of lint and inspected

We clear lint from the dryer vent

Most people empty the lint screen after every load and never think about the rest of the vent. The screen catches most of it, but fine lint gets past and packs into the duct between the back of the dryer and the cap outside. When you move into a house, whatever the last household left in that duct comes with it. We clear the full run, from the dryer connection to the outside cap, as part of the move.

Around Phoenix, homes are built on concrete slabs, usually with block or wood frame walls finished in stucco. With no basement or crawlspace to run the duct through, the dryer vent often goes up through the attic and out a cap on the roof. That run is longer than a vent straight through an outside wall, and it has more bends. Every bend is a place for lint to build up. In summer the attic is the hottest part of the house, and the lint sitting up there is bone dry.

A clogged vent usually shows up as a dryer that needs two cycles to dry one load. Sometimes the laundry room gets hot while it runs, too. Lint catches fire easily, and a blocked line keeps the heat in the dryer and the duct. After the run is clear, we inspect the line for crushed sections and loose joints. Those are the spots where lint and hot air escape into the wall or the attic. You hear what we found before you start doing laundry in the new place.

We degrease the range hood and cabinets

We clean commercial kitchen exhaust hoods, and the range hood in a house has the same grease problem on a smaller scale. Grease from cooking rises and settles on the underside of the hood and in the filter, where it cools into a sticky film that holds dust. A spray and a paper towel only move it around. It has to be softened with a degreaser first, then wiped off and rinsed.

We pull the filter and soak it, then clean the hood inside and out. The cabinet faces on either side get cleaned too, since the same grease lands there. After that come the cabinet insides, and then the counters and backsplash. Where the fridge and range slide out, we clean the floor and the wall behind them. The strip beside the range usually holds the worst of it, because spills run down the gap and nobody can reach them.

When it is done, you can touch the underside of the hood without your fingers sticking, and the filter lets light through again. That matters in a move, because a greasy hood is one of the first things a buyer or a landlord notices in the kitchen. Mark Moreno put it this way in a Google review of our hood work: "Good communication left my hood spotless."

Hard water leaves scale in every bathroom

Phoenix water is hard, and it leaves white scale anywhere water sits and dries. In a bathroom that means the shower glass, the faucet bases, the showerhead and the grout at the bottom of the shower wall. Scale builds in layers, so a house where the last people only wiped things down can have years of it on the glass. It looks like cloudy glass that no spray will clear.

Scale is mineral, so an all purpose cleaner slides right over it. It takes a cleaner made for mineral deposits, left on long enough to soften the buildup, then a scrub and a rinse with clean water. Skip the rinse and the fixture looks fine while it is wet, then dries with a white film. Once the scale is off, the toilet and every surface people touch get a disinfectant cleaner, since the next household uses that bathroom the first night.

Older homes around Phoenix often have saltillo tile, a soft clay tile that soaks up dirt and does not handle acid cleaners well. On saltillo we use a neutral floor cleaner and keep the scale remover off it. On glazed ceramic or porcelain tile, the grout is where the dirt lives, especially around the toilet base and along the tub. We scrub the grout lines along with the tile face, so the floor is one even color from wall to wall.

We clean before your boxes come in

The best time to clean a house you are moving into is before anything of yours is inside it. With the cabinets empty, we can wipe every shelf before your dishes go on it, and every closet before your clothes go in. Once the boxes arrive, half the floor is covered and the cabinets fill up. Then the clean turns into something you do a corner at a time for months.

Dust is the Phoenix problem an empty house cannot avoid. It blows in under doors and collects in the tracks of sliding doors and windows. In monsoon season, one dust storm can leave a fine layer on every surface. If the house sits empty between owners, we set the clean as close to your move in date as the calendar allows. We do the window and door tracks right before the floors, so the grit we pull out of them does not end up on clean tile.

If you are the one moving out, book the clean for after the last box is out of the house. A room cleaned with a dresser still in it has to be cleaned again under the dresser. Our hours are Monday to Thursday, 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM. If the truck is loaded on a weekend, pick a key handover date that leaves a weekday for the clean. Tell us the date the keys go back when you call, and we plan the work from that date.