To leave the house not entirely spotless?

[Amimissingsomethinghere]

On the day of completion how clean was the house / flat you moved into? Did the previous owners leave it in a clean state for you?
Seriously stressing about how to get everything done and moved and packed and cleaned.
I was going to hire some cleaners to clean for a bit to leave the property nice and clean but a friend said I don't need to?
I plan on deep cleaning and getting professional cleaners to clean the place we are moving into... so wouldn't really mind if it wasn't cleaned but what's protocol?

I’ve left every property very clean and every property I’ve moved into has been really clean too. I’d hire professional cleaners if possible. Obviously if the buyers had been awful I wouldn’t bother.

Our sellers kept banging on about having the place professionally cleaned. They def did not, cobwebs and dirt everywhere.

Nothing you can do about it. Don’t kill yourself trying to leave it spick and span, just don’t damage anything on way out and try to keep it clean as you for karma’s sake. There is so much to do when moving.

Don’t take all the plants from the garden as our sellers did...

We were moving to an empty house, and buying our buyers flat to enable the chain to move. Left our house absolutely spotless, backing out of the front door mopping as I went. Said to our buyers to not rush their move as we will be letting the flat so take their time. The house we moved to was basically empty and was A) left in a compete and utter mess, and B) the ‘white goods’ all included in the sale had been changed for shite models. The flat? You guessed it, another total *hithole, even having said not to rush they could not be bothered to go back and clean. People eh? ....

Okay so I am going to give it a proper clean with a few extras but nothing special. My oven is very clean apart from a few marks so I'm leaving that but going to give the fridge a nice clean. Dishwasher and washing machine I guess just put on a cleaning wash and wipe down.
The bathrooms I will give a good clean and the rest I plan a decent hoover and dust.
I'm not bothering with windows etc. Im going to leave it how I would like it but not go over board. Thanks for the tips!

I feel a bit bad as where we have taken paintings down the paint has faded around them so it looks a bit crap. But I can't repaint the walls now!

There will never be consensus on this issue. Unless you absolutely can’t afford the cleaners, just pay someone to do it to take the weight off your mind.

Everyone has different standards tbh

I have always cleaned floors/toilets and hoovered before departing

When i moved in to our current home the previous owner kept on about how they had 'deep cleaned' the oven and 'deep cleaned' the bathroom

The kitchen floor made my feet black (it is tiled)

The cooker was filthy- think years of cooked on food

The bathroom was so-so

Everyone means something different when they talk about cleaning

When we moved into ours is was absolutely filthy, I'm talking black rings round the bath, stair carpet with an area free of fluff and hair up the middle but the rest disgusting, rubbish left on the lawn, bits of food left in the freezer, just generally dirty and unkempt (toilets remarkably clean though ) Gutting really as we had a week where we had both houses, plan was to decorate the new one before moving in but ended up spending it cleaning. We left ours clean and tidy and grass cut etc. Not professional clean but clean so you could put your things in straight away and load stuff on shelves etc without worrying. Definitely cleaner than it was when living in it if that makes sense :)

Lawyers told us it's never worth complaining or trying to do anything about getting the house in a filthy state as you just get quoted that people have different standards. My standards aren't that high but i'd never leave dirt for anyone to move into.

I'd expect to decorate so wouldn't worry about marks on the walls other than dirty spashes which should have been wiped.

I'd expect:

clean toilets and bathroom in general
Clean kitchen and appliances (not necessarily professionally cleaned but definitely clean)
hoovered
floors mopped
everything actually emptied and not rubbish left behind.

I mean, I might want to antibac the shit out of it and hoover and dust to within an inch of it's life, but I shouldn't have to.

If it was me, all floors would be hoovered, and surfaces would be wiped. So it would be perfectly clean but maybe not clinically clean.

Plus, moving into a new house, you pretty much want to clean everything again anyway!

The house I bought was utterly disgusting. I nearly cried.

I leave a previous home spotless, clear down rooms as they are emptied by the removers, the Hoover comes in the car with me. I wouldn’t dream of leaving a dirty house for the next occupants.

If you can, get your wheelie bins emptied. My sister moved into a house where the last owner had crammed a load of crap in the outside bins and she had to pay to get them emptied. With two kids in nappies it was a real pain for her not to have empty bins.

My house was immaculate. Flowers and wine and a card in the kitchen along with a corkscrew. A folder of bus timetables, bin collections, recommendations of take always. It was so kind.

@Sunnydaysstillhere

Cleaner here..I work for a ll and do end of tenancy cleans. No way would he let anyome move into a dirty home!!

Sunnydays, can I ask a question? I helped a friend move out of a rented flat a while back. We cleaned every inch of the place — team of four women. We dusted ceilings, cleaned the doors and door furniture and all round all the architraving and skirting boards with hot soapy water, scrubbed the kitchen units until they gleamed, cleaned the bathroom till it sparkled and the loo shone, washed the windows inside and out and the floors and hoovered and dusted to death. We got all the hair and gunk out of all the plugholes, steam-cleaned all the tiles and the shower cubicle in the bathroom, wiped the light switches, wiped the curtain poles, polished the shower enclosure...

At the end it was immaculate. The landlord docked her £50 because he said the place was cleaned to a good amateur standard but not to professional standard and he needed to pay a professional cleaner for a couple of hours. What would a professional do that we didn't?

The ll was a cf... Sounds more than acceptable to me!!
Even if he had claimed the carpets needed a clean he would have charged more than £50.

OP I wouldn’t bother with a professional clean. Make it nice but don’t stress out.
We sold our house to the world’s worst buyer. The seller of the house she had placed an offer on before ours had pulled out. We realised why very quickly. She visited way too many times, wanted certificates for everything, grilled me on the fire and security alarms (I don’t fucking know!), was terrified we would pull out so would chat with me at lengths to ‘assess’ my MH as a potential risk to her future.
On completion day, she pulled up with the van outside our house at 7am (we got the keys at 2pm). She sat out in her car on the phone crying whilst we loaded the van. By 10am, our movers and her movers were crossing paths. I nearly blew a gasket when her elderly father tried to pick up our tv to ‘help’ the movers and loaded my baby’s things onto the drive.
We had tried to keep things clean during the move (having scrubbed everything beforehand) but she complained about the shower door and my husband trampled up the stairs in muddy shoes to ‘fix’ it.
Two weeks later we received a letter from our solicitor informing us that there was apparently a leak from an outdoor pipe (!). What did she want? A fucking refund? To return the house? Sue your bloody surveyor woman!
Suffice to say, I will never ever bend over backwards for any future buyers (ps this has been cathartic. I didn’t realise how much anger I still felt for the woman three years on).

I would not leave anything in the garage or loft, it's a proper pain in tht he fuckign ARSE to get rid of someone else's old pain pots & broken electrical appliances.

The contract usually states that the property must be left empty (or rubbish)

I feel a bit bad as where we have taken paintings down the paint has faded around them so it looks a bit crap.

that is pretty normal! Freshly painted walls would only make the buyer worry you were hiding something

I've always left it very clean but not hired professionals. It is a pride thing. This house was clean but I still scrubbed it all and that's how I found out that the gas didn't work and the loo was leaking and not attached to the floor...

I think our vendors totally switched off from the house once we offered! My mother is still going on about the built in fridge (which was broken and had been for some time, but they'd never bothered to get rid of, oh god I regret opening that door). She did one of her epic cleans on the kitchen while I tackled the cobwebs and carpets. We're still discovering weird things those people did to the house a year and a half in.

I'd just spent a week frantically scrubbing the rental we were leaving, too, I was not amused.

I would leave it in a reasonable state, but not professional standards. I would reclean things anyway. When my daughter moved in to her first house, it took me, 2 sisters and her Mother in Law days to clean the filth in that house. It was so bad and kitchen was that awful, she ripped it out and got a new one.

I really don’t understand this at all. When the hell do you clean it??

Yes of course I would never leave a place filthy and I have a v clean house.

But when I moved flat, it was full of boxes. The delivery men only took the boxes out just as we were completing (ie as money transferred as confirmed by solicitor as standard practice). It was a small flat so the boxes were everywhere! No cleaning possible until boxes gone at which point we no longer legally owned it so had to leave!! Of course I had a quick sweep round but professional level cleaning no time!!

Unless you have a studio flat, and you'd probably wouldn't have that many boxes anyway, movers empty bedroom first. You clean bedroom. Quick clean of bathroom and kitchen whilst they are emptying living room. When they are done, you clean living room and hall.

If you have booked movers for 8 or 9am, and completion time is midday - which is fairly common - that's more than enough time to empty and clean a small flat.

4 times I have moved and only once has the house been clean. In fact only once has the house been clear of the previous tenants shit.
I will do a basic clean (apart from the one that was clean, I left that one spotless) like hoover the floor and clean the kitchen and bathroom but that's about it.