Moving Into A Sublet: Someone Else's Apartment, Someone Else's Things

The difference from any other move-in

Moving into an empty apartment, everything you find is either yours to clean or yours to report. In a sublet neither applies. The apartment is full, the things in it belong to someone who is coming back, and the person you answer to is a tenant rather than a landlord.

That changes the question. It is not how thoroughly to clean, it is where the line is between cleaning and rearranging someone's home.

Day one, before you unpack anything

• Photograph every room wide, then anything already marked, stained, chipped, or broken.
• Photograph the inside of the fridge and the oven, which are the two places a handover most often skips.
• Photograph any of their belongings left in the open, especially anything valuable or fragile.
• Send the whole set to them the same day with a short message rather than keeping it on your phone.
• Ask which cupboard, shelf, and wardrobe space is yours to use, and where the things you displace should go.
• Ask what is off limits entirely, since most people have one or two things and would rather be asked than assume.

Ten minutes of this on the first evening covers the whole stay. Nobody has ever regretted having it, and the people who skip it find out at the end.

Clean what you touch, leave what you do not

The useful scope is contact. The bathroom in full, the kitchen surfaces and sink, the bed and whatever linen you are using, the floors, and the handles and switches. That is what makes an apartment feel like yours to live in, and none of it involves their possessions.

What to leave: their wardrobe, their drawers, their cupboards of things, their shelves. Do not tidy, do not reorganise, and do not put things away somewhere sensible. A tidied shelf is the version of helpfulness that produces a message asking where something went, and you will not be able to answer it.

What you can and cannot be charged for

Your agreement is with the tenant, so their deposit is the money that is actually at risk, and they will look to you for anything that comes out of it. Marks and damage that were there when you arrived are not yours, which is what the day-one photographs settle.

Two categories deserve care because they are expensive and easy to cause. The first is anything you treat: a stain removed with the wrong product on their sofa or their floor leaves a lighter patch that is worse than the stain, and that one is entirely on you. The second is smell, which transfers into fabric across a whole apartment and takes weeks rather than days to clear.

The handover back

• Return it in the state you got it in, which the photographs define exactly.
• Everything of theirs back where it was, including anything you moved for space.
• The fridge emptied of your food, and the bins out.
• Linen washed and back on the bed rather than folded in a pile.
• A message a week before you leave asking whether they want anything specific done, since it is cheaper to ask than to guess.
• Photographs on the last day, from the same angles as the first set.

When it is worth booking a clean

For a stay of a few months, one visit at the end does more for the relationship than a running effort throughout, and it costs less than most people expect for an apartment that is only being cleaned rather than emptied.

If the apartment was left in poor condition when you arrived, one visit at the start is the better spend, and it is reasonable to raise splitting it with the tenant. That conversation goes better with the day-one photographs attached to it.

A single visit at either end is one-time apartment cleaning, the version for an apartment you are starting in is move-in apartment cleaning, and the cleaning checklist is a fair standard to hand back against.