Is that really necessary?

When I sold my parent's house after the death of my father, I visited it a few days before contracts where exchanged as it was my childhood home and I wanted to say "goodbye". I'd removed all the contents fairly soon after Dad's death. I was horrified to find builders in, they had knocked down a wall and were busy working. The new owners had copied a key so they could do work before moving in but it wasn't even their house!

Define "necessary" in the situation described.

If there's power and water.....

Not that I'm against leaving a house clean and hoping for a clean one to move into but there's necessary and there's necessary.

In short, I have moved into dirty houses and coped, as I'm sure lots of other people have.

Excuse typos!!

set it all out on the dining table

a very large crane lifted a large container and swung it across a harbour. At that moment the cranes chain snapped and the total container fell into the sea!!
😯

I have certain things which I always carry with me and never let them be packed by anyone else. Good idea. However, there's a limit to what you can take if not travelling by car.

One removal firm advised us not to pack glassware, china, etc as they would do all thst and it would then be covered by their insurance. So I serpt it al, out on the dining table (we didn't have so much in those days, no inherited china etc). One removal man walked in and was extremely rude, swore and said we should have had that lot packed u already!
He was also obnoxious when he arrived the next day to unload. I hadn't wanted to move anyway and he was the final straw. 😥

Definitely leave it clean!

My daughter moved into a house that had a plug of the previous tenant’s long hair in the bath (discovered when it wouldn’t drain) - yuk!

Nicotine stained walls, yuk!

And finally - the carcass of a roast chicken in the oven …

By contrast - when we moved into our current house where the elderly owner had died, her sons handed over an immaculate, if dated, home with a card and a bottle of wine to welcome us on the kitchen counter.

We always leave houses sparkling clean for the next occupant. It’s just what you do!

Having moved 19 times in all over the years have seen the best and worst at times, but have always left a clean and decent house myself, and my gift to the new people has always been two things. A small "house" book. This is a notebook with each room given a few pages. It contains the dimensions of the room and windows, the amount of wallpaper needed and curtain lengths etc. Any information, such as which floorboard to take up to look at pipes or whatever. At the back I list all the people we have used, such as plumbers and electricians who have done whatever work in the house etc. Then there is also a box with the spare roll of wallpaper for each room so that they can use it until they decide what they want to put there themselves. I have found people very happy to have that to start off.

Then through long experience , when I go looking for a house and then decide on the property I scout around for a b/b or small hotel close to the house. Then we book two nights there. Sometimes I have been able to organise an evening meal of casserole and jacket potatotes that can keep until we are ready, or we get fish and chips etc. That way if the removal van is late or there are any problems you know that you can go and get a shower and have a nights sleep in a clean bed. You also dont need to put the beds up first and make beds, especially if your things have come from abroad or been stored. Then the luxury of staying one more night in the b/b again lets you work methodically , without the need to have beds and kitchen ready when you are shattered. I think it is money well spent and stops a lot of tired and angry rows at the end of the day.

Must tell you of the worst thing I saw and felt so sorry for the family concerned. In these days of container removals, of course there is less likelihood of things being lost or stolen from the removal. However when we were moving to Damascus we were in the middle east at a port, when a very large crane lifted a large container and swung it across a harbour. At that moment the cranes chain snapped and the total container fell into the sea!! No matter what compensation you receive you have lost so much of your precious things, which are not necessarily worth money but matter a lot to you. I have certain things which I always carry with me and never let them be packed by anyone else.

After every move I think we all feel never again, but you never know what may turn up. I find however good or bad the state of your new home, having decent neighbours is the really important thing that can have a lasting effect on your life. It affects you so much more than the state of the rooms, but I can certainly look back on some hard cleaning jobs to get places straight. Couldnt do it these days so fingers crosse4d I can now just stay where I am!

I've moved fairly frequently over the years. A couple come to mind. One was owned by an alcoholic whose wife left him. He obviously didn't want to leave and that was obvious with clothes scattered in every room, food left in the fridge and under the grill and bottles everywhere too. It genuinely looked as if he still lived there. We didn't stay long in that house. We had lovely neighbours on one side but the adjoining neighbours were awful.
The house I lived in when my marriage ended was in a horrible state. I knew it was bad but omg. They had painted round furniture and even paintings on the walls, the oven alone took a full morning to clean and we discovered rabbit droppings under the kitchen floor covering. The bedrooms were covered in children's graffiti. However, none of that was structural. My family and friends helped so much to sort it all out. I had painting parties and eventually I saved enough for a new kitchen. The neighbours were absolute gems. It was a really good price because of the state of it and I lived in it with the children for many years.

Leaving a house clean is how most of us have been brought up am sure, my OH laughs whenever we stay in a hotel because I tidy up and make the beds, making sure the bathroom is in order before the cleaners come in.
We are moving but are nowhere near completion and will of course clean the house before we go, touching up with paint here and there. The bungalow we are moving to looks very clean and well kept anyway but am hoping the owners will think to get rid of the accumulated dust behind furniture as they pull pieces out for removal. It is amazing how much muck there can be in a house kept immaculately clean once you move stuff around.
We moved into a house 30 years ago that had carpets soaked with cat wee and walls nearly brown with nicotine stains. We couldn’t live in it for some time and had to rent a place whilst we ripped out carpets and stripped walls. We used to love doing up houses back then, would just roll up our sleeves and get stuck in, and the kids would help. Happy days.

One of our house moves was to an empty bungalow; the owner had died and his daughter showed us round on the two viewings- both in winter but each time the back door was open as were some of the windows.
The intention was to do it up, so we weren’t too worried about the internal condition which was shabby, as we knew the structure was ok.
Just as well, on moving day we opened the front door to be knocked back by the reek of urine.
We ended up replacing the floor boards in one of the bedrooms, the bathroom and the loo before we got rid of the smell.
Lovely place when it was finished

My daughter rented prior to buying for a year . On leaving we cleaned and even painted slight marks on the walls . At one time we were cleaning each other's cleaning ! She received a letter from the estate agent to thank her for leaving the house immaculate. We've always left homes sparkling , yet I've moved into filthy houses . Bought one 1930s house , lived in by old man who's daughter helped him move . Nothing was cleaned and she left a letter saying she didn't have time to clean and left a cheap bottle of wine ! It was filthy .

Leave it generally clean by all means ... but don't overdo it ... you have enough on your plate.

When we moved 20 years ago, DH had repainted the house top to bottom ready to sell, it sold in days.

We cleaned it all thoroughly before we left, it was going to people we knew, and I would have been mortified if they had said to others “ Oh, you should have seen what a mess Calendar left the house in”.

But I would have done it regardless if it had sold to strangers.

Witzend Many years ago, friends had a similar experience. They were buying a renovated Victorian house with all the period features.

When they and their possessions got to the house after completion, they found the front door swinging open because th previous owners had removed the lock, and this was just the start for finding that the house had been stripped of light fittings, light switches, door handles, plus curtain rails etc.

They had to move into a hotel for a week until they had found a locksmith and an electrician to make the house safe for them and their 2 small children, and, to begin with, fitted basic white plastic electrical fittings to replace the original fittings that had first attracted them to the house.

A lot of people had similar experiences, which is why, at the moment we are filling in a long form saying, room by room exactly what we will be leaving in the form of light fittings, fixed mirrors, door furniture etc for the house we are selling.

DD moved last week. Her new home has been let out for the last 10 years, we had gone round it with her, and it was a lived in mess, so she was all prepared to get professional cleaners in as soon as she took possession, but to be fair to the tenants, they may have lived in a mess, they clearly got a professional cleaner in when they moved, but they had a dog and a cat and DD walks around indoors without shoes and has an obsession about not having to walk on carpets that animals 'had been wiping their bums on'. So the day she moved in she began ripping all the carpets up and I must say, when all the carpets were in the skip, the faint lingering smell of dog disappeared.

Yes it is ! Wish everyone would think the same. I left my last house immaculate, the new people commented to the next door neighbour that they were so happy to be left a gleaming house.
Unfortunately for us our new house was terrible. The boiler was broken, the kitchen doors fell off when we opened them, and it smelt of dogs. We stayed in a hotel for a couple of nights, I got a professional cleaner in, then moved back in and cleaned it again.
Hope you’re lucky with your new home.

I only cried once and that was with the house we are in now. I spent days ripping up carpets emptying the vacuum cleaner time and time again before sitting down and sobbing. It is laughable now but at the time i wondered what we had done. I absolutely love living here now but thought we had made the wrong decision at the time. I am glad no one ever had to do that with a house they moved into after we left.

We sold our house in Cornwall and bought one in Berkshire. The family we were buying from were renting a house, A couple of days before we moved we had a phone call asking if we could postpone our move for a week because their rental had fallen through. So we arranged for all our stuff to go into storage and we went to stay with our daughter. That week stretched into three months before they found another rental! To cap it all the day we moved we arranged for the removal van to arrive early to give us plenty of time to unpack everything. It turned up at lunchtime having gone to another area with the same name. We had sent them maps, but they hadn't bothered to bring them!

I lived for years in military quarters so was very used to deep cleaning a house before moving.
My daughter knew this so I was drafted in to clean the rented flats he lived in.
I spent 2 days, on my own, scrubbing an Edinburgh flat for her, I scraped thick grease off the tops of the kitchen cupboards. I don’t think they had been cleaned for years.
She hot her full deposit back…
Because the upstairs neighbour burned the flat down!

Witzend

It wasn’t dirt, but when we moved into our current house, decades ago, the vendor had removed all the light bulbs and taken all the curtain rails down.

I was particularly upset because we’d allowed her to stay for 4 days beyond completion, since her new house wasn’t ready. Our solicitor was horrified! And she knew I’d be moving in on my own, with a small baby - dh was working an 8 hour flight away.
She was evidently majorly pissed off with dh for having bargained hard over the price. She had said very sniffily, ‘You are not in an Arab marketplace now!’
Dh had replied, ‘Well, you can take it or leave it…’

It wasn’t dirt, but when we moved into our current house, decades ago, the vendor had removed all the light bulbs and taken all the curtain rails down.

When we moved into our first house it was evening and the previous owners had removed all the light bulbs and even left bare wires hanging from the ceiling in a couple of rooms. No curtain rails either! They'd also dug up everything from the garden, even the spring bulbs. It wasn't very clean but not absolutely filthy.

Think I have told this story on here before. We arrived at our new home, inside there were clothes and belongings strewn everywhere, in the middle of the sitting room floor were 2 empty bottles of wine. Owner had obviously thought should I pack in preparation for my move tomorrow, nah will just get drunk.
We rang them and said if they didn't come and sort it out their belongings would be on a skip within the hour.
The house was filthy too.

It wasn’t dirt, but when we moved into our current house, decades ago, the vendor had removed all the light bulbs and taken all the curtain rails down.

I was particularly upset because we’d allowed her to stay for 4 days beyond completion, since her new house wasn’t ready. Our solicitor was horrified! And she knew I’d be moving in on my own, with a small baby - dh was working an 8 hour flight away.
She was evidently majorly pissed off with dh for having bargained hard over the price. She had said very sniffily, ‘You are not in an Arab marketplace now!’
Dh had replied, ‘Well, you can take it or leave it…’

Many years ago we moved into a house that we bought from a lady who was self employed cleaner. She claimed to have 'bottomed' the house.........not sure on her standard of cleaning but we started at the top and worked our way down emptying the Dyson several times and the water in the buckets we used for wiping paintwork had to be changed several times too. The place was filthy!

Yes it is necessary. When we were in Army quarters, we never left one less than spotless and ready for the inevitable “March out” white glove treatment. However, I lost count of the ones we moved into that were very dirty. When we sold our first proper home thirteen years ago, I cleaned it from top to bottom, not least because the couple who bought it were expecting their first child literally within days of moving in and I wanted cleaning to be the last thing they should have to think about.

Yes, completely necessary.

2 houses stand out in our many moves.
One had a room that was so smoky (just ordinary tobacco!) and a kitchen which was extremely greasy from constant use of a deep fat fryer.
The other was also very greasy in the kitchen and no attempts made to do anything about it.
Each time I got my best friend (the Queen of Cleans Pants ) who helped me to make my new homes acceptably clean - and she is still my best friend of 50 years so far.

My only contact with dirty houses has been short term flat rentals. Every house we have bought, 5 in all has been acceptably clean. I am not 'the Queen of Clean' and have never wished to be. I am quite happy with sufficiently clean.

Mind you, our current house was immaculate when we moved in because the previous owner probably scraped off all the dirt to try and sell it. He tried to get us to pay £200 for his mother's very elderly washing machine among other things and when we refused to pay for any of the in-place tat he offered us, he stripped the place, carpets, curtains, lampshades. He left nothing that he thought he could get away with taking.