An inspection is not a look around. The person holding the checklist compares what is in front of them against the condition report and the photographs taken the day you moved in, and they do that by opening doors and running a hand along edges. A unit can look finished from the middle of the room and still fail on the first three things anybody touches. What follows is the walkthrough in the order an inspector tends to run it, room by room, with the items that stay hidden until a door is opened.
What does a landlord actually inspect?
Two habits separate an inspection from a glance, and both are worth knowing before you plan your effort.
The first is the flashlight. A phone light held low and raked across a counter, a floor or a pane of glass shows film, streaks and settled dust that overhead lighting hides completely. The second is the fingertip, run along the top of a door frame, inside a window track, across the top edge of a baseboard and under the cabinet above the range. Whatever turns up gets photographed, and one grease fogged cabinet interior in a photo argues that nothing else was done properly either.
Ask for the checklist in writing before you start. Where a landlord or property manager has one, cleaning against their list instead of a generic one removes any argument about whether an item was in scope. If your lease leans on a phrase like broom clean, read the whole clause first, because that term carries less than people assume; the turnover cleaning page sets out what it does and does not cover.
The kitchen: work from the inside out
Kitchen residue sits inside an appliance or behind a door, so the order of work matters. Start with the oven, because it needs dwell time while you do everything else. Interior floor, walls and ceiling, the racks, the inside of the door glass, and the gap at the bottom of the door where spatter runs down and collects. Pull out the drawer underneath, since a broiler or storage drawer collects crumbs and grease. Clean the door gasket, the vent trim above the door and the base of the control knobs. If the range slides out, the gap beside it holds crumbs bonded into old grease.
The refrigerator next. Shelves and glass surrounds come out, crisper drawers lift out so the well underneath can be cleaned, and the door gasket gets opened fold by fold, because that is where mold shows first. Door bins, the freezer floor, the top of the unit and the grille at the base all count, and so does the floor underneath once the unit is rolled forward.
Then everything with a door on it: inside every cabinet, drawer and closet, including the back corners of drawers where crumbs sit in the seam. Adhesive shelf liner reads as something left behind rather than as cleaning, so it comes out along with its residue. Wipe the toe kicks, the tops of upper cabinets where no soffit closes them off, which is how a lot of older Buffalo kitchens are built, and the underside of the cabinet directly above the range. Finish with the fittings: dishwasher filter basket, door gasket and the lip under the door, the range hood filter and the housing behind it, then the sink drain flange, the sprayer head and the base of the faucet.
The bathroom items an inspector checks first
Shower enclosures and grout lines, in that order. The bottom track of a sliding shower door has removable end caps and a channel under them, and that channel is easy to miss because the door looks clean while the track is full. Do the rollers and the seam where the frame meets the tile at the same time.
Grout lines, the overflow plate, the drain and the showerhead all get looked at. Grout that stays discolored after cleaning may be dyed or stained rather than dirty, which is worth establishing before you spend a night on it.
The toilet is inspected around it rather than in it: the floor behind and beside the base, the bolt caps, the hinge posts and underside of the seat, and the supply line and shutoff valve. In the vanity, clean the cabinet floor where bottles have leaked, the drawer, the medicine cabinet shelves and their edges, the sink overflow ring and the mirror clips. Last, take the exhaust fan cover down and wash it.
Bedrooms, hallways and living space
These rooms fail on horizontal edges and on anything mounted to a wall or ceiling, all of it invisible while the furniture was in place. The list is short and it is the same in every unit.
- Baseboards including the top edge and the shoe molding at the floor
- Door tops, door frame tops and the top edge of trim
- Door handles, push plates and every light switch plate
- Light fixture bowls, taken down, emptied of dust and insects, and dried before they go back
- The upper edges of ceiling fan blades
- Supply vents, cold air returns and the louvers themselves
- The smoke detector housing and the wall around it
- Closet shelf, rod, brackets and the floor corners of the closet
- The wall plane where a headboard, sofa or dresser stood
- Radiator fins or baseboard heat covers, and the wall above them
- The sill or sleeve where a window air conditioner sat
Older housing stock across the region makes two of those harder than they sound. Cast iron radiators and baseboard heat covers hold a felted dust between the fins that a cloth cannot reach, so it has to come out dry, with a brush and a vacuum, before anything wet goes near it. And the wall above a heat source can carry a faint dark plume from years of convection, which is a wall washing job rather than a spot clean.
Windows, sills and tracks
Tracks come out dry first, with a vacuum crevice tool or a brush, and only then does anything wet go near them. On double hung sashes, raise and lower both so the hidden part of the channel is reachable, and clear the weep holes at the bottom of the frame where they can be reached. Storm window channels collect years of dead insects and sand.
Interior condensation through a long cold season leaves a mineral ring at the bottom of the sash and along the sill joint, and sometimes a spotted line of surface growth on the paint beside it. Both are cleaning items while the finish underneath is intact. Sills get the fingertip test, so do the front edge as well as the flat. If screens were taken out and stored in the basement or garage, say so at the walkthrough instead of leaving the inspector to find an empty frame.
Floors and the salt line at the entry
Through the salting season, road salt walks in on boots and dries to a white haze on tile, vinyl and hardwood near the door. Chloride residue is hygroscopic, meaning it keeps pulling moisture out of the air, so a plain damp mop redistributes it rather than removing it and the haze returns the moment the floor dries. It needs a neutral rinse and a change of water, not a second pass with the same bucket. The same salt wicks into the first few feet of carpet, where it reads as a lane grayer than the rest of the room.
Salt film, grit and soil lift out. Fiber crushed flat by traffic, and scratched or water swollen board edges, are wear rather than soil, which carpet cleaning and floor care each cover in full. Knowing which of the two you are looking at before the last night decides whether the effort is worth spending.
Photograph it, and name the damage out loud
Photograph the finished unit the way the move in photographs were taken: a wide shot per room, plus close ups of the oven interior, the refrigerator interior, the tracks and the tub, dated and kept. If a deduction for cleanliness is proposed weeks later, that set is the thing that answers it.
Where something turns out to be damage rather than soil, flat paint burnished shiny by scrubbing, an etched tub, dyed grout, say so at the walkthrough instead of scrubbing harder. If you would rather hand the checklist to somebody than work it at midnight, that is what a turnover clean is for. Call (716) 444-3622 with the property type, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and your deadline.