The Parts Of Your Lease That Are Not The Apartment

Read the lease for the word also

The apartment is obvious. What is easy to miss is that the same document usually assigns a locker number, a parking space, a bike hook, or a storage cage, often in a schedule at the back rather than in the main body.

Anything assigned to you is something you hand back, and anything you hand back can be inspected. Go through the lease specifically looking for numbers: locker 14, space B-22, bike rack 7. Those numbers are the checklist.

The usual list

• Storage locker or cage, which is where the things you forgot you owned are.
• Bike room space or hook, including any bike you stopped riding two winters ago.
• Parking space, which needs sweeping if anything leaked and clearing of whatever accumulated in the corner.
• Balcony or patio, including the floor, the drain, and anything stored there over winter.
• Mailbox, emptied, and its key returned.
• A garage bay, a shed, or a basement space in lower-rise buildings.

Why these produce charges

Because emptying them is a hauling job for the building. A locker with a broken chair and three boxes in it is not a cleaning line, it is a removal cost, and removal costs are higher than cleaning ones.

There is also a timing problem. The apartment gets walked through on handover day, and the locker often gets opened a week later when the next resident is assigned it. By then you are gone, the charge is on a statement, and the conversation is one-sided.

Do them a week early

• Empty the locker first, before the apartment, since whatever is in there needs sorting and some of it will need disposal.
• Photograph each space empty, with the number visible if there is one.
• Sweep the floor of the locker, the parking space, and the balcony.
• Remove your padlock from a locker or bike hook, or it gets cut and charged.
• Check the balcony drain, which is the one item on this page most likely to be genuinely blocked.
• Confirm in writing which spaces the building considers assigned to you, in case the lease and their records differ.

The padlock is a small thing that reliably costs money. A lock left on a locker gets cut off, and cutting it off is billable.

The balcony deserves its own mention

It is the one space that is both outside and clearly yours, which means it accumulates for years and never gets a normal clean. Furniture nobody used, a bag of soil, a dead plant, and a floor nobody has washed since move-in.

It is also visible from the outside, which makes it the part of the handover most likely to be noticed by someone who is not even inspecting. Clear it, wash the floor, and clear the drain.

Getting them into the plan

Put the non-apartment spaces at the start of the move-out week rather than at the end, because they involve disposal decisions rather than cleaning, and disposal takes days rather than hours when a tip run or a collection is involved.

The apartment side of the same week is in the move-out timeline, the items to hand back are in the keys and passes guide, and the unit itself is what move-out apartment cleaning covers.