Moving out; cleaning advice!

desperaterobots

So I have to clean my old apartment since I've moved out. This is my first apartment and I'm male and therefore certain I will forget to clean something vitally important and have my bond reduced or.. something. (They do that right?)

I've had the carpets cleaned, I've washed the curtains... But I know I'm going to forget to do something.

So I'm looking for cleaning advice:

- What's the best way to clean linoleum floors?
- Is there anything I should look out for that landlords/agents are particular about?
- There's some double-sided tape on one of the walls. It seems to be impossible to get off. Pro-tips?
- Shit, I've already forgotten about the inside of the oven.

Help!

Fristle

I pretty much swear by Magic Erasers. They'll get all the marks off the walls, and they take discolorations out of lots of things.

You could take the double-sided tape off with a putty knife. The paint will probably come with it though.

If you haven't damaged anything, or left anything obviously marred/scarred/burned/stained, then you're done. Don't stress about it. I've never had a deposit held, in like a half dozen places I've rented. If you left the oven dirty, they would just clean it -- landlords expect to have to clean that kind of shit. A lot of renters .... a lot of people in general are just slobs and it's not tough to be a better than average renter.

AtomBomb

You could try a hair dryer to get the tape off your walls. Or goo-gone. However, if the tape has been up their for awhile, and the paint is sufficiently old/shitty, the two may have bonded in such a way that you're not gonna get it off without damaging the paint. If that's the worst thing going on I wouldn't be too worried.

Any kind of mopping stuff is fine for linoleum. The landlord just wants his place to be:

A) undamaged.
clean, or not filthy.
C) that's really it.

They don't expect everything to sparkle. If the oven isn't disgusting I wouldn't worry about it. You could use the self clean cycle if it has one, or get some of that oven cleaner shit. However, that stuff is pretty toxic so I would just leave it alone (unless it's awful). I bet you the landlord doesn't even open the oven when he inspects the place.

desperaterobots

Your replies calm me greatly, though some of my work buddies I was speaking to today told me they'd been asked to return to properties to clean more as they weren't up to scratch. Sounds kind of awful.

Butterfly4u

Don't forget to wash the inside of the refrigerator and the inside of the dishwasher.

Rhino

I've had places with hold part of my deposit for "cleaning fee". It was pretty good too (I actucally cleaned it before I left).

IreneDAdler

If you're worried about getting surprised by large deposit withholdings, then you can ask the property manager or your landlord to assess your current state and give you an estimate of what they would charge you if you left it like that. Then if they name some gargantuan sum, you can clean more before you leave; or they might tell you that the place is so clean they would eat off the bathroom floors and then you can stop worrying. I'm pretty sure there's some law that requires landlords to give these estimates to renters.

As for how clean you have to make it, I would probably say not terribly. I mean, don't leave moldy cheese in the fridge or anything, but I doubt things have to look brand-new. When we moved out of our rental house in Seattle, we spent like days cleaning out every nook and cranny. The place was cleaner than when we first moved in. When we got the deposit back from the landlord, she thanked us for taking such good care of the place, but also told us that she had to dock some money to fix the lawn, which was somewhat expected, because we never took care of it (I think we might have mowed it and pulled weeds maybe 4 times in the 3 years we lived there). And she also included some stupid thing about how she had to get some bathroom fixtures replaced because we had changed it, even though we hadn't, but we decided to not pursue it because the tab for the lawn dwarfed it in signicance.

Podunk

One tip I was given was to make sure corners of rooms are clean. When someone does a quick job, the corners of rooms will usually still have dustballs and such. If they see the corners are clean, it's a quick way to know that the tenant actually did clean up.