We clean inside every cabinet and drawer

We work from the ceiling down

An empty house shows everything. Once the couch and beds are gone, you can see the gray dust line along each baseboard and the cobwebs behind where the dresser stood. So we clean in a fixed order. Ceiling fans and light fixtures come first, then the tops of door frames and window casings, because whatever we knock loose falls toward the floor. Switch plates and door handles get wiped on the way down, since those carry the most fingerprints.

The kitchen takes the longest. We open every cabinet and drawer and wipe them inside, into the back corners where crumbs pack in. The refrigerator gets every shelf wiped, with the crisper drawers pulled out and washed in the sink. The oven and stovetop get the most time, because baked-on grease needs the cleaner to sit before it lets go. Rush that step and you leave a brown film that anyone opening the oven door will see.

Bathrooms come next. We scrub the tub or shower and the toilet, including the base and the floor behind it, where hair collects out of sight. Then we disinfect the surfaces people touch, like faucet handles and the flush lever. Floors are last in every room. We vacuum along the baseboards first, then mop. We work from the back of the house toward the door, so nobody walks across a floor that is already done.

• Inside of every cabinet and drawer
• Refrigerator and oven cleaned inside
• Baseboards and door frames wiped by hand
• Bathrooms scrubbed and disinfected
• Floors vacuumed and mopped last

Canton capes and colonials collect hidden dust

Many of the houses around Canton and Stoughton are post-war capes and garrison colonials, with split-levels mixed in. Each style has its own trouble spots. In a cape, the upstairs bedrooms sit under the roof, and the small knee-wall doors open into storage space that fills with dust. Once your boxes are out, we vacuum those spaces too. A split-level has several short runs of stairs, and every tread has a front edge where dust builds up against the carpet or the wood.

Heating is the next trouble spot. A lot of these homes run on hot water baseboard, and the metal fins behind the covers catch dust and pet hair all year. If nobody cleans them, the heat comes on the first cold night of fall and the whole house smells like burnt dust. We pop the front covers off where they come loose and vacuum the fins underneath. In homes with forced hot air, we lift the floor registers and vacuum inside the opening.

Older wood windows need their own attention. Double-hung windows with storm windows on the outside collect grit and dead bugs in the tracks. The sills hold a layer of dust you only notice once the curtains come down. We vacuum the tracks and wipe the sills as part of the move out. If you also want the glass cleaned inside and out, window cleaning is a service we offer. Down in the basement, we clean the floor where the washer and dryer stood, since lint collects there for years.

Winter and summer moves need different work

A winter move in Massachusetts means hours of boots going in and out, and those boots carry road salt and sand across the floors. Salt dries into a white haze on hardwood and tile, and sand scratches the finish if a wet mop drags it around. So we vacuum the grit up before any water touches the floor. Then we wash with a cleaner that lifts the salt and go back over it with clean water. Skip the rinse and the haze comes back as the floor dries.

Summer brings a different problem. Humid air sits in a closed-up house, and an unplugged refrigerator with the door shut can start to smell of mildew in a few days. If you unplug it before we come, prop the door open. Bathrooms in older homes often have no exhaust fan, so mildew shows up on the grout and on the ceiling over the shower. The products we use are eco-friendly and non-toxic, and they work on mildew, but they need time to sit on it. We give them that time instead of scrubbing harder.

Across the Boston area, many apartment leases end on the last day of August. That means one tenant's move out and the next tenant's move in often land on the same weekend. It leaves a short gap between trucks, often in late summer heat. We work evenings and weekends, which helps when the only open time is after the movers leave on a Saturday. Tell us when the keys change hands and we will plan the cleaning around it.

Landlords and buyers look in different places

When you rent, the landlord walks the unit after you leave, often with photos or a checklist from the day you moved in. They open the oven and look under the burners. They pull out the refrigerator drawers and check the bathroom fan grille. Those are the places we spend extra time on a rental move out. We cannot tell you what a landlord will decide about your deposit, but we can make sure those spots are clean.

When you sell, many purchase and sale agreements in Massachusetts ask for the house to be left broom clean. That is a low bar, and buyers still do a final walk-through before closing. An empty house with a greasy range hood and hair in the bathroom drains is the last thing they see before they sign. We clean it to the standard you would want if you were the one buying. The kitchen and main bathroom get the most attention, because buyers open the most doors there.

Moving in is the easiest time to clean, because nothing is in the way yet. We wipe and disinfect the kitchen shelves and drawers before your dishes go in, and we sanitize the bathrooms before anyone uses them. Closet shelves get wiped before clothes go on them. If the last owners had pets and the carpet shows it, we also do carpet cleaning. It works best before any furniture sits on the carpet. Book it for the gap between the closing and the moving truck.