Clean The Kitchen Cabinets Before The Dishes Go In

Why this one is worth doing first

Almost everything else in a move-in clean can be redone later. Cabinets cannot, in practice, because redoing them means unloading a working kitchen onto the counters on an evening when you have other things to do.

It is also the surface your plates, glasses, and food are going to sit on for the length of the lease. A turnover clean usually wipes cabinet fronts and skips the insides, so what is in there is whatever the previous resident left.

The order

• Vacuum first, with the crevice tool along the back corners and the shelf edges, so you are not turning crumbs into paste.
• Wash with warm water and a drop of dish soap. Skip anything harsh, because most rental cabinet interiors are laminate or thin veneer.
• Wipe with a damp cloth, then dry properly. Trapped moisture in a closed cabinet is how the smell starts.
• Leave the doors and drawers open for an hour before anything goes in.
• Do the drawer runners and the underside of the drawer fronts, which collect grease nobody sees.
• Finish with the cabinet handles and the fronts, which is where cooking grease actually lands.

What to look for while they are empty

This is the only convenient moment to inspect them, so use it.

• Droppings, egg cases, or dead insects in the back corners, particularly under the sink.
• Water staining or swelling on the shelf under the sink, which points at a slow leak.
• A musty smell that stays after the cabinet has dried, which is not a cleaning problem.
• Shelves that are loose, cracked, or missing pegs.
• Gaps around the pipes under the sink, which is how both pests and smells arrive.

Photograph anything you find and send it to the building the same day, before your things are in there. A report on day one reads completely differently from the same report three months later.

The shelf liner question

Liner is worth it under the sink and in the drawer where cutlery lives, and mostly optional everywhere else. Its real value in a rental is that it takes the wear instead of the shelf, which matters at move-out.

Use the non-adhesive kind. Adhesive liner left by a previous resident is one of the more annoying things to remove, and leaving your own behind creates the same problem for you when it is time to hand back the keys.

The rest of the kitchen while you are there

• Inside the fridge and freezer, including the drawers and the door seal.
• Inside the oven, the microwave, and the dishwasher filter.
• The gap between the counter and the stove, which is where things fall and stay.
• The pantry floor and the shelf above the fridge.
• Under the sink, which is normally the dirtiest cabinet in the apartment.

Doing it in one pass on an empty unit

All of this takes about an hour in an empty kitchen and considerably more once boxes are open. That is the whole argument for doing it in the gap between getting keys and moving furniture in, even if the gap is short.

If the gap is too short to do it yourself, that gap is exactly what move-in apartment cleaning is scheduled around: cabinet interiors, appliances, and the whole unit before anything of yours arrives. The cleaning checklist lists what is included in the kitchen.