We clean inside every cabinet and oven

An empty house shows every missed spot

A move-out cleaning starts high and finishes on the floor. Ceiling fans come first, because the dust on the blades has to land somewhere, and it should land before the floors get done. Then the walls get spot washed, the door knobs get wiped, and every cabinet gets wiped inside and out. The kitchen and bathrooms take the longest. The floors come last, hard floors mopped and rugs vacuumed, as we work our way back to the front door.

An empty room hides nothing. With the couch and the beds gone, you can see the gray line where a dresser sat against the wall. You can see the film of grease on the cabinet doors beside the stove. The next person walks in with fresh eyes and a phone flashlight. Our job is to find those spots before they do. That means opening every drawer and checking every shelf, including the high ones nobody sees from the floor.

The kitchen gets the most time. We clean the inside of the oven and the microwave, then wipe out every cabinet so the next family can put dishes straight onto the shelves. Skip the oven and the next person smells the last owner's cooking the first time they preheat it. Skip the tops of the upper cabinets and someone finds a layer of sticky dust the first time they reach up there with a rag.

• Inside every kitchen and bathroom cabinet
• Oven and microwave cleaned inside
• Ceiling fans, door knobs and walls wiped
• Interior windows and window sills cleaned
• Hard floors mopped and rugs vacuumed

The landlord walkthrough checks inside everything

Most move-outs end with someone checking the work. For a tenant, that is the landlord or property manager with a checklist and a deposit on the line. For a landlord, it is the next tenant, who notices everything in the first week. Either way, people check the places a quick clean skips. That means inside the oven and the cabinets, the window tracks, the tub caulk and the laundry room floor where the washer sat.

We take a photo of each room when it is finished and send the photos to you. That matters most on a move-out. Often you have already moved out or you are across town unpacking at the new place. If a question comes up at the walkthrough, you have a picture of that room from cleaning day. One move-out customer wrote that they "got pictures and updates, and overall a really smooth experience."

Landlords and property managers also book us between tenants, including buildings where one unit empties right after another. A real estate client wrote, "We use Maid it on all of our multifamily and residential cleans." The cleaning has to fit between leases. So the order matters. Book the cleaning after any painting or repairs are finished. Otherwise dust from that work settles on clean floors and the unit gets cleaned twice.

Hampton Roads humidity works on empty houses

Summers here are long and damp, and an empty house takes the worst of it. When a place sits closed up between owners, the air conditioning often gets turned off or set high to save money. Moisture settles in, and within a few weeks there is mildew on the bathroom ceiling and a musty smell inside the closets. The house looked fine the day the last tenant left. It does not look fine when the new one walks in.

Older windows add to it. On cool mornings water beads on the inside of the glass and runs down into the sill and the track. There it turns into black grime a paper towel cannot reach. In spring, yellow pine pollen coats every sill and gets tracked across the floors. We clean the glass on the inside, then go into the tracks and the sills, because a clean pane over a dirty track still looks dirty.

Near the Virginia Beach oceanfront and in Ocean View, sand comes in on every pair of shoes. It packs into the corners and the sliding door track. That track gets vacuumed out and wiped, or the door grinds for the next tenant. One more thing helps anywhere in the region: if you are moving out, leave the air conditioning on until the cleaning is done. Mildew wiped off a ceiling in a house with the air off can come back before the new people arrive.

Older Norfolk houses need more careful cleaning

Norfolk and Portsmouth have a lot of older homes, like the brick and frame houses in Ghent, Colonial Place and Olde Towne. Many still have plaster walls, painted wood trim and original hardwood floors. They need a lighter hand than a new build. Old paint on trim scuffs if you scrub it hard, and water left standing on old hardwood soaks into the seams and lifts the finish. On those floors we use a damp mop, not a wet one, and keep the water moving.

Farther out you find brick ranch houses, split levels, garden apartments and townhouses. These usually have flat wall paint, and flat paint is the hard part of a move-out. Scrub a scuff too hard and you leave a shiny patch that shows worse than the mark did. We test a small spot first, wash off what will come off, and leave alone the marks that need a painter. Then we tell you which ones those are, so nobody is surprised at the walkthrough.

The newer vinyl-sided homes in Chesapeake and Virginia Beach are easier on the walls but have their own trouble spots. Builder-grade cabinet doors show every fingerprint, and the white shelves inside collect a brown ring under each bottle of oil. The laundry room collects lint behind and under where the washer and dryer stood. When the machines leave with the seller, that bare patch of floor is the first thing the buyer sees in the room.

Realtors book us before the listing photos

Selling a house often takes two cleanings. The first happens before the listing photos, sometimes while the sellers still live there. It goes after what a camera picks up: fingerprints on the appliance fronts, streaks on the windows and dust on the fan blades. The second happens after the moving truck leaves, when the house is empty and the buyer's final walkthrough is coming up. That one follows the full move-out list, cabinets and oven included.

Local agents refer their clients to us. Agents care about the moment the front door opens at a showing. An empty room that smells clean and has clear windows looks bigger in person and in the photos. A dusty sill or stained oven door in a good listing photo is what a buyer remembers. One realtor wrote, "As a local realtor I’ve worked with many cleaning companies and they definitely set the bar high."

Buyers are on the other side of the same job. The house you just closed on was cleaned by people who were busy packing, and it usually shows inside the cabinets and the oven. A move-in cleaning before your boxes arrive is the one time every shelf will be empty. We wipe out the cabinets and clean the oven before you ever turn it on. The tubs and showers get scrubbed too, so your first shower in the new place is in a clean tub.