We clean the inside of every cabinet

An empty house gets cleaned top down

A move in or move out clean happens in a house with nothing in it, and that changes the job. With the couch and rugs gone, you see the dust line where a dresser stood and the crumbs along the bottom of the kitchen cabinets. We start up high, on light fixtures, ceiling fan blades, vent covers and the tops of door frames. Dust falls when you clean overhead, so anything below it that got cleaned first has to be cleaned again.

Then we go inside everything that opens. Every kitchen cabinet and drawer gets vacuumed out and wiped. That includes the shelf edges and the hinges near the stove, where grease collects. Closet shelves and rods get wiped too, since a closet is where clean clothes go first. The fridge gets cleaned inside with the drawers pulled out, and the oven gets the baked-on grease taken off the racks and the door glass. A kitchen can look clean from the doorway and still have sticky shelves, and the new owner finds them with the first box of dishes.

Bathrooms come after the kitchen. We scrub the tub and the grout lines, then clean the base of the toilet, where hair and dust pile up behind the seat hinges. Soap film comes off the mirror and the shower glass. Floors go last because everything above them sheds onto them. We vacuum first, then wash the hard floors room by room and back out toward the door. Skip the vacuum and a wet mop drags beach sand across the wood, which leaves fine scratches you see in the afternoon light.

• Light fixtures and ceiling vents dusted first
• Inside of every cabinet and drawer wiped
• Fridge and oven cleaned inside and out
• Window tracks and baseboards wiped by hand
• Floors vacuumed and washed last

Move in cleaning comes before your boxes

Moving in is the one time the house is ever this easy to clean. Once the truck is unloaded, the closet floors disappear under boxes and the cabinets fill with dishes. Nobody pulls it all back out to wipe the shelves. So we clean before your things arrive. A lot of purchase contracts only ask a seller to leave the house broom clean, which means swept and empty. It does not mean the inside of the oven was touched, or that the bathroom was washed after the last person used it.

In a house someone else lived in, we spend the most time on the places your hands and your food will touch. The cabinet under the kitchen sink gets scrubbed. It held the last owner's trash and cleaning bottles, and old drips dry on the bottom of it. The dishwasher filter gets pulled and rinsed, since food from the last load sits in it. Door handles and light switches get wiped in every room. In the bathroom we clean the toilet down to the floor bolts, and we wipe out the medicine cabinet and the vanity drawers.

Some people are still at their old home when the new one is ready. If that is you, we can pick up groceries and house supplies and put them away once the kitchen is clean. Then you do not walk into an empty fridge. We can also help move furniture into the rooms where you want it. Tell us about both when you call, because the order matters. The floor under a bed or a sofa gets cleaned before the furniture goes down, never after.

Houses left empty for months need more work

A lot of houses around Hampton Bays sit empty for part of the year. Some sales close on a house nobody has lived in for months. A closed house does not stay clean. Dead flies and ladybugs pile up on the windowsills, and mice can get into the kitchen drawers and the backs of the lower cabinets. We check those spots first. Droppings get sprayed with disinfectant and wiped up by hand. Sweeping or vacuuming them dry puts their dust into the air you breathe.

Damp is the other problem. Houses out here are mostly wood frame, and a lot of them are cedar shingled capes and ranches. A house like that, closed through a humid spring, picks up a musty smell. It shows up first in closets on outside walls and on the back panels of the sink cabinets. We wipe those surfaces and leave the closet doors open so they dry. If we find mildew that keeps coming back, we tell you. That kind comes from a leak or a wet crawl space, and wiping will not fix it.

The weather here is hard on windows too. Windows near the bay and the ocean pick up a salty haze. In late spring, pine pollen from the woods around Flanders and Manorville leaves yellow dust on the sills and screens. With the curtains gone and sun coming straight in, every streak shows. We clean the glass, then the sills and the tracks, where sand and dead bugs collect. Nancy Melius wrote that Suave was "particularly communicative and attentive to ensuring our windows were clean".

We clean for the final walkthrough

When you sell, the buyer walks through the house one last time before closing. By then the furniture is usually gone, and the marks it was hiding are in plain view. Think of dust outlines on the floor, or scuffs where a bed frame rubbed the wall. We clean for that walkthrough. Sasha Wade used us for a sale on a short schedule and wrote that the team "left the entire home very clean for the purchaser". Give us the walkthrough date when you call, and we plan the clean around it.

If you rent, the landlord decides how much of your security deposit comes back. Landlords check the places tenants forget, like inside the oven, the top of the fridge, the bathroom fan cover and the sliding door tracks. We clean all of those. Scuffs on painted walls get wiped gently. Flat paint turns shiny or rubs off if you scrub it hard, so we test a hidden spot first. We cannot tell you what a landlord will decide about your deposit. We can make sure the house is clean in the places they check.

The last step is a walk through the empty house with the lights on. We open every cabinet and closet one more time. Then we look at the floors from low down near a window, where streaks and missed spots show up. My Hamptons Cleaning guarantees a job well done, and this walk is how we check it. That matters most when you are running a move from another house and cannot see the place yourself. Ian Hantman wrote that the "owner of the company is so communicative and helpful".