Nov 5, 2022
The Most Difficult End Of Tenancy Cleaning Job

From an individual’s perspective, the toughest end of tenancy cleaning job to handle is cleaning a house or apartment after someone has died. It’s tough tidying up someone’s personal effects and cleaning the house so that the place can be sold for estate purposes, or so whoever’s inherited it (or bought out the other beneficiaries of the will) can move in, or so the family trust can rent the place out. Although the task can help with the grieving process, sometimes, it’s just too much.

It can be particularly hard if your recently deceased relative had a health condition and/or the place was a real mess. The act of cleaning up can trigger a lot of (probably unnecessary) guilt. The questions might start flowing through your mind as to whether your relative would have had a few more years (or months or whatever) if the place had been cleaner… if you had noticed that the cupboards were full of mould (if this happens to be the case) or that the floors hadn’t been mopped. Could you have done something about it?

Not Guilty!

Pause. Take a deep breath. If you step back from the raw emotion for a moment, you may be able to see things in a different light. Guilt and the what-if process can also be part of the grieving process. Let me reassure you that you didn’t notice the dust bunnies in Granny’s wardrobe – you weren’t a nosy interfering prat who poked around in your grandmother’s personal stuff. You respected her, so you didn’t go in there. What’s more, if you go and have a look at your own wardrobe, you’ll probably find the same amount of dust bunnies. In fact, yours might even be worse.

It’s human to let the bits of dirt build up over time and not really pay attention to them until something drastic happens. For a lot of us, something drastic is moving house, which is why moving out cleaning services are so popular. For others, the drastic thing might be renovations or (the ultimate in drastic changes) a death in the family. So don’t blame yourself or worry that if you had cleaned your relative’s house a bit more, they would still be alive today. It’s probably not true. Your relative was human and left some aspects of cleaning until the drastic thing happened.

So let’s lift that load of guilt off you, shall we?

Why Cleaning After A Death Is So Hard

There are two parts to clearing up a house after someone has died. The first part involves dealing with the personal effects of your deceased relative. This is emotionally tough for obvious reasons – there are often memories attached to the different items that need to be sorted. Other items will have a particularly poignant pathos about them – the jigsaw puzzle that was never completed, the leftovers carefully saved for lunch on the tomorrow that never came, the carefully tended houseplant that is about to burst into flower. You can expect to cry a bit during this stage.

I found this amazing video about this guy who cleans houses after death. Very impressed.

However, then there’s the actual cleaning. This is tough because it emphasises that your late relative is gone and won’t return. Someone else will live in this house now, and the cleaning is part of preparing for this change. Even if that someone is you, there’s a particular grim finality about it. Yes, it can bring closure, but even so, cleaning an entire house is always a tough job that seems to take forever. You’ll probably want the whole job of cleaning all the skirting boards, vents and cupboards over with well before the process is completed, especially if you’ve gone through the emotional wringer of clearing out the personal effects.

To make matters worse, there are often time pressures involved. You can’t take too much time from work to sort through your late relative’s personal effects and clean up the place. You know, and all the rest of the family knows, that the sooner the place is rented or sold, the sooner the estate can be wound up. This adds extra pressure and emotional difficulty, meaning that the task seems even more burdensome.

Professional Moving Out Cleaners Are Here To Help

When you have to clean the house after someone has died, then calling in a professional moving-out cleaning company often makes good sense. After all, professionals have a certain distance between the house and what’s in it, as they don’t have a personal connection. In some cases, there may have been a connection if the cleaning company in question provided domestic cleaning services as well as end of tenancy cleaning, and someone from that company was your great-aunt’s regular cleaner. All the same, because of that distance, the professionals will be a lot more efficient about the job because of the lack of emotional involvement.

Professional cleaners will also use a proper checklist, just like they do when cleaning a rental property, so that the former tenants can get their deposit money back. They will also use this checklist when tidying up your late relative’s place, meaning that nothing will get overlooked. If you try to do your own tenancy cleaning after the funeral, it can be easy to overlook things… even if a whole team of you is working at it, all feeling a bit sore and upset.

Incidentally, if your relative was renting rather than living in a home they owned, then getting the moving-out cleaning done is particularly urgent. After all, although your landlord is likely to have some sympathy (and if they don’t, then shame on them), he or she will probably need to have the place ready for a new tenant as soon as possible. In this case, the easiest thing to do from your perspective is to load all your late relative’s property into a trailer, cart it off to someone’s house, and deal with it there while the end of tenancy cleaning company comes in and does the cleaning work. Just make sure that you get in touch with the landlord so that you don’t take away any of his or her property that was in the rental by mistake (e.g. the fridge).

Getting into a professional company is also useful if your relative’s old house is going to be rented out by a family trust. This post isn’t going to give advice on the pros and cons of doing this, but we acknowledge that it’s going to be emotionally tough to see a house that’s been in the family and has all those memories go to a stranger. You may consider renting the furnished place to deal with Grandad’s old white goods and furniture. However, you’ll still need to ensure that they are cleaned. In fact, it can be all too tempting just to leave the couch there and the fridge without cleaning them properly. You may regret this because if the tenants find the fridge dirty when they come, they will probably leave it in the condition that they found it. Several years down the track, when they move out, then you will probably feel differently (it’s natural), and you will be rather annoyed that the couch looks so filthy and that the tenants moving out didn’t clean behind the fridge.

It’s also smart to get a professional cleaning company if you are the one moving into Grandad’s old house, although this is more like moving in cleaning than moving out cleaning. This way, you can concentrate on the process of moving and doing the end of tenancy cleaning at your old place… but you may want to get the professionals in to do that as well!…

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