If you read my first post, you know that the house we bought had been abandoned for almost 12 years. When I called to schedule a pest control visit during escrow, they asked me what we had. I answered that I assumed we had it all.
We bought the house as-is, but that didn’t mean we didn’t have in a bevy of inspectors before closing. From our friends in construction, structural engineering and architecture, to roofers, electricians, gardeners, pest control, etc., we called in dozens of people to give us the worst news we could get so we would be prepared.
For the most part, that strategy has served us well, the only unforeseen problem being a gas leak (more on that in another post).
But the entire time we were in escrow, we were dreaming of cleaning and restoring and what we would need to do over. My husband said he thought a team would take 2 days to clean it. I said closer to 2 weeks. These are some of the photos of how the house looked when we bought it (note that there are entire walls and windows that are not visible due to all of the things piled in there, not to mention around 70% of the lights weren’t working):
The house smelled when we bought it. Emptying all the junk help the smell somewhat. But moving items that had been in there for years has another effect. It uncovers mounds of dust balls, spider webs, trash, and more left behind when they were exposed from their hiding spaces.
In a perfect world, I would say start your fixer upper project by getting the lights on. But I have learned that that is not always so easy (and also not always that safe, see upcoming post). In the meantime a couple of good clamp lights (use an LED bulb so it doesn’t get too hot) and an extension cord will do the trick. You do need to see to clean.
I highly recommend cleaning before you do any work. Why clean before working? Because things we thought we would need to tear out (like the kitchen cabinets), turned out to be perfect. We had multiple wood-floor refinishing guys in during escrow. After a thorough cleaning and polishing, we realized it wasn’t necessary.
The first week we were cleaning was disheartening even though I had an amazing housekeeper on my team. This was just such a huge undertaking, you couldn’t look at it the way you look at most cleaning projects. It ended up taking us about 5 weeks to clean the inside of the house (with a daily team of least 3 and sometimes up to 5 people). Now when I mean clean, I mean no stone unturned, no surface not entirely disinfected. I could have shaved a week, maybe even two, had I known how to approach a very neglected house.
If you are cleaning any fixer-upper or abandoned house, here’s the order in which you should tackle things:
- Empty the entire house of anything not built in or too big to move. Store everything in a garage for instance if possible. A storage POD you can rent and place in the driveway could work as well.
- Assemble your tools. Getting your deep cleaning arsenal right is very important. You don’t want to waste time constantly running out to the store. I have a post on 19 Must Have Deep Cleaning Tools for your fixer upper.
- Sweep, vacuum or a combination of the two, the entire house. I like both sweeping and vacuuming and I found that with our rather extra dirty case house, sweeping and then following with a vacuum is useful. We will get to the serious tools later but at least you will have removed dirt that would inevitably just migrate around the house and impede cleaning.
- At this point and at this point only, start cleaning from one end of the house to the other. Or top to bottom if you have a two story house (dirt does fall). For us, we started at the end of the house with the kitchen (our front door is in the middle of the house) because it was the worst. We had a loft on that side, so we started up there. There are two other things to consider in your cleaning order. One, is that getting the worst room out of the way makes you feel better and motivates you to keep going. Two, if the kitchen is not the worst room, you may still want to consider moving it toward the front of the cleaning schedule since having a functional kitchen makes working much easier.
- Clean each room from top to bottom since gravity takes dust and dirt downwards. You don’t want to clean more times than you need to. In a dirty house, start with the ceiling.
- You may need to clean the floor multiple times for extremely bad cases. Stay tuned for an entire floor post. Not all floors are created equal and there isn’t just one way to clean them.
- Once you have cleaned the entire house, be ready to clean once more. This cleaning will not be as intense but it is equally important since in a very dirty house dirt tends to migrate.
I will be sharing before and after photos and lots of detailed cleaning tips over the next weeks and months. If you want to be alerted to a post, please send an email to info@lovecleanrestore.com to get on the newsletter list or subscribe below: