mopping a floor

If you are moving to a brand new house, you can be certain that dust and sawdust have settled in pretty much every corner of the house. The cleanliness challenge is even greater if you are moving into a house or an apartment that has been lived in before.

Scrubbing is necessary in both cases, but you have to sanitize the whole place in a smart manner. Drawing up a cleaning checklist ensures you don’t miss any section of the house, otherwise subsequent cleaning sprees will make an even bigger mess.

The Bathroom Will Need A Thorough Scrub

We start the cleaning checklist with the most challenging room in the house: the bathroom. In fact, the bathroom is going to be the first room you will need when you move in, so it has to be ready for use. Start by scrubbing the toilet bowl/bidet thoroughly and sanitizing the toilet seat.

From then on, it’s time to do the same with the shower or bathtub and the wash basin. Finally, it’s time to polish the wall tiles and clean the floor. You can use the cleaning time as an opportunity to also inspect the plumbing for leaks or moldy patches in crevices. They should be addressed immediately.

Cleaning the bathroom is different from cleaning other rooms in the sense that it’s enough to scrub and physically sanitize the place. Chemical treatment is required as well but you should try to use green cleaners that don’t hurt the environment.

You can even make your own homemade green cleaners to save a bit of money.

Cleaning the Windows

When they leave the factory, window panes aren’t only well-protected but they are clean. However, the installation process is messy, so you are bound to encounter greasy fingerprints all over the pane.

Cleaning windows isn’t particularly hard, but a typical house has more than two dozen panes, so it’s a prolonged process. A neat trick that you can use to speed up the process is to use a larger sprayer, so you cover the entire surface of the pane in a single spray.

As mentioned earlier, the cleaning solution can be homemade and it should definitely be green. Conventional window cleaners contain harmful chemicals that remain inside the house after the cleaning process is long over.

Once you mix up a homemade cleaning solution, you can use it multiple times. Everything from the vanity unit’s mirror in the bathroom to the small basement windows (don’t skip them, they’re the muckiest) can be cleaned with this cleaning solution.

Vents and Allergens

When it comes to the air quality inside your home, you are going to cough while cleaning the house. You need to come prepared with a face protection mask (unfortunately, we are used to them by now) while you dust the home.

However, to ensure long-term air quality, all the vents inside the home need to be dusted and ideally washed. This is an important item on the cleaning checklist. The kitchen hood exhaust, the air vent in the bathroom, and the AC filter need to make their way onto the dusting checklist.

The reason why thoroughly cleaning air filters of all sorts is important is dust allergens. Inhaling fine dust particles can lead to various chronic respiratory diseases. The problem is only exacerbated if you have kids inside the house, as they can develop asthma.

Polishing the Woodwork

It might not appear so, but there are numerous wooden surfaces inside your new home, such as banisters, baseboards, and bookshelves. You cannot use water to clean the woodwork, so you’ll need a different kind of approach.

Start by dusting the shelves (from the top) and then apply a bio-based wood cleaner. These solutions are made from plants and essential oils that give out a pleasant, natural scent.

Once you polish the woodwork, it will truly shine and attain a stronger color. The cleaner can be reused on other non-porous surfaces inside the house.

mopping a floor

Need to Clean The New Home Fast?

Cleaning the entire house at once is a daunting task. The sheer scale of the cleaning needed is overwhelming for a single person, so asking for help is perfectly acceptable. It would be great if your friends and family could pitch in but this is not always possible.

Luckily, there are professional cleaners such as NDIS cleaning service that will amaze you with their speed. A mammoth cleaning project is nothing new for them, as they have both the equipment and more importantly, the experience to get the job done quickly.

Clean Inside the Bathroom and Kitchen Cabinets

After you’re done scrubbing the bathroom it’s time to stock the cabinets, right? Although this is true in general, the insides of the cabinets need to be cleaned and sanitized before you put anything inside them. This is even more important in the kitchen, where hanging cabinets are used for storing food.

Washer Linens and Towels After Unpacking Them

Once the bathroom cabinets are sanitized, it’s time to stock them up with towels and other linen. However, the linen needs to be washed first. Chuck all the bedsheets, towels, and tablecloths into the washer after the movers bring them over from your old place.

Once in your new home, you might want to give natural liquid laundry detergents a chance. They penetrate deep into the fabric, removing old stains. Once the towels and linen smell like the ocean or lavender, they are ready for storage.

It is the Kitchen’s Turn to Get Scrubbed

After the bathroom is ready to use, carry the cleaning solution and brushes into the kitchen. Kitchen surfaces need a thorough cleaning, as they might be smelly from earlier occupants’ cooking escapades.

Luckily, there is no need to waste money on expensive kitchen cleaners, as the aforementioned green cleaners you’ve used on windows will do just fine.

The all-purpose cleaner shouldn’t contain any VOC but it should still be powerful enough to remove grease, dirt, and grime. Finally, don’t forget to look up at the ceiling, as there might be stains from cooking oil that will require a small paint job.

Don’t Skip the Oven

Before your family is ready to cook the first meal in your new home, the oven needs to be spotless. Unlike the kitchen that can sometimes be quite clean (the previous owners were fastidious), the oven is bound to be greasy and have charred food leftovers inside. Equip yourself with oven cleaners and scrub hard, as there is no other way to purify the oven.

Unclogging the Kitchen Drain

While cleaning the kitchen, you might notice a strange, rancid smell coming from the sink or the drain. Before you are ready to tackle it, first wash the inside of the kitchen sink to get all the muck off the walls and down the drain.

Then you are ready to apply a sink unclogger that should get the job done in 15 minutes. Even if the drain isn’t clogged entirely, food leftovers might still be stuck to the walls of the pipes, giving out the foul smell we’ve mentioned earlier.

Dealing With a Smelly Dishwasher

Speaking of stenches, there is nothing worse than a stinky dishwasher. Before you are ready to use the dishwasher that came with the house for the first time, it needs rinsing. This will help kill all the bacteria that originate from food leftovers. Be sure to include this on your cleaning checklist.

Again, bio-based products are ideal for cleaning the inside of the dishwasher effortlessly. All you have to do is follow the instructions on the packaging and turn on the dishwasher like you normally would. No heavy scrubbing like with the oven, thankfully.

Steam-Clean the Carpet

Whether you have arranged with the previous owners to leave the carpeting behind or you plan to buy brand new mats and rugs, they will need cleaning. However, the aforementioned issue of scale arises once more: how do you clean dozens of carpets at once?

Instead of washing the carpets one by one, having to take them outside the house and then bring them back inside, steam-clean the carpets in place. Steam cleaners use both vibration and the power of water to clean a carpet, so it will be sanitized as well (getting of muck and especially the grime).

We have listed 12 actions that need to make their way onto your cleaning checklist. Once you order the cleaning tasks by importance, it will prove a lot easier to clean the whole house. Of course, you can always entrust the cleaning spree to professionals in the industry, as dusting, scrubbing, and rinsing are physically-demanding chores.

We hope you found this blog post Drawing up a Cleaning Checklist Before Moving into a New Home useful. Be sure to check out our post How To Do A Thorough Cleaning In The House for more great tips!


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