You signed the lease, you have the keys, and you are standing in the doorway of your first apartment. Somebody lived here until just a few days ago. Depending on who they were and how their own move-out went, that fact is either invisible or extremely obvious.
This is the part of moving off campus that nobody warns you about. There is no facilities crew. Nobody inspected this place before handing it to you. Whatever condition it is in right now is the condition you inherited, and the window to do anything about it easily is about to close.
Why an Off-Campus Apartment Isn’t a Dorm Room
If you lived in university housing, your room was cleaned before you arrived. It was one room, it had almost nothing in it, and a staff member with a checklist went through it between occupants. The bar was set by the university, and somebody was accountable for meeting it.
An off-campus apartment works differently. The bar was set by your lease, and the phrase in most leases is some version of “broom clean”. That is a much lower standard than it sounds. Broom clean means the previous tenant removed their belongings and swept. It does not mean anyone touched the inside of the oven, the shelf above the closet rod, or the gasket around the refrigerator door.
Sometimes a landlord brings in a cleaning crew between tenants and you walk into a genuinely clean unit. Sometimes the last tenant was moving out at 11 PM the night before their lease ended, with a car full of boxes and a final exam behind them, and they did the absolute minimum. You will not know which situation you are in until you look.
There is also more of it. A dorm room is a room. An apartment is a kitchen with appliances, a bathroom with a shower and an exhaust fan, closets, and floors that run under furniture you did not put there. The job is several times larger and there is no maintenance staff to call.
Walk Through and Photograph Before You Unpack
Before anything else, before you carry a single box up the stairs, walk the entire unit with your phone and photograph everything.
Do this even if the place looks fine. Especially if it looks fine.
Open every cabinet and photograph the inside. Photograph the inside of the refrigerator, freezer, and oven. Get the bathroom in detail, including the grout and the caulk line around the tub. Photograph the floors in every room, the walls, the window tracks, and any scuff, stain, burn, chip, or crack you find. Take pictures of anything that already looks broken.
This serves two purposes at once, and both of them matter.
The first is that it is your condition record. Whatever is wrong with this apartment on day one is not your fault, and the only way to prove that ten months from now is to have documented it before you moved in. Illinois and Evanston both have specific rules about how deposits get returned and how deductions have to be itemized, and a dated set of photos from the day you got the keys is the single most useful thing you can hold onto. Getting your deposit back at the end of the year starts here, not in May.
The second purpose is practical. The walkthrough is also your triage. By the time you finish, you will know whether you are dealing with a normal cleaning job, a rough one, or something that is not a cleaning job at all.
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What the Last Tenant Probably Skipped
Some things get cleaned because they are visible. Countertops, the floor in the middle of the room, the bathroom sink. Other things get skipped because you have to open something or move something to see them, and a tenant on their way out of the state is not opening anything. Check these first:
In the Kitchen
- Inside the refrigerator and freezer, including the drawers and the door gasket.
- Inside the oven and under the burner grates.
- The range hood filter, which is usually coated in grease and which almost nobody has ever cleaned.
- Behind and underneath the stove and refrigerator if you can move them.
- Inside every cabinet and drawer.
- The dishwasher filter at the bottom of the tub.
In the Bathroom
- The exhaust fan cover, which collects dust and slows down until the room stops drying out properly.
- The grout and the caulk seam where the tub meets the wall.
- Behind and under the toilet base.
- The medicine cabinet interior.
- The showerhead.
Everywhere Else
- Closet shelving and the tops of door frames.
- Window tracks and sills.
- Baseboards.
- Light switches, outlet plates, and door handles.
- The tops of ceiling fan blades. Inside the coat closet.
Specific to Older Buildings Around Here
A lot of the housing stock near both campuses is prewar or midcentury, and it comes with features newer apartments do not have. Radiator covers collect an impressive amount of dust and are usually removable. Window air conditioning units have filters that pull out and rinse, and if the unit was left in place over the winter it needs attention before you run it. Back stairs and rear porches count as part of your unit in most leases, and they get skipped by everyone.
The Order That Saves You Time (the DIY way)
An empty apartment is the easiest version of this job you will ever get, and it stops being empty the moment your first box comes through the door. Clean before you unpack, not after.
Work top to bottom. Ceiling fixtures and fan blades, then upper cabinets and shelving, then counters and mid-level surfaces, then baseboards, then floors. Dust falls. If you mop first and then wipe the tops of the cabinets, you get to mop again.
Do the kitchen and bathroom as complete rooms rather than jumping between them, because both need cleaner to sit on surfaces for a few minutes before you wipe. Start something soaking, move to the next task, come back.
Floors last, in every room, and then stop touching them.
If you have roommates, split by room rather than by task. Two people working on the same bathroom get in each other’s way. Two people each finishing a bathroom get done in half the time.
When It Stops Being a Cleaning Job
Some things you find during the walkthrough are not yours to fix, and trying to fix them yourself can work against you.
If you find evidence of pests, that goes to the landlord in writing, immediately, with photos. Same for any mold, any active water leak, any appliance that does not work, any window that will not lock, any door that will not lock, and any missing smoke or carbon monoxide detector. These are habitability issues, not cleaning issues.
Put it in writing even if you also called. A text or an email creates a record with a date on it. If you scrub it yourself and say nothing, you have quietly taken responsibility for a problem that was never yours, and you have erased the evidence that it existed when you arrived.
When It’s Worth Hiring Out
There is a version of this where it is fine. You have a couple of days, the place is in decent shape, and you and your roommates knock it out in an afternoon.
Then there is the other version. You arrive Thursday, your parents drove eight hours and are leaving Saturday morning, the apartment has not been properly cleaned in two years, and classes start in a week. Three roommates are arriving on three different days with three different ideas of what clean means, and none of you own a vacuum.
That is when it makes sense to bring somebody in. A move-in cleaning covers the whole unit while it is still empty, which is the fastest and most thorough it will ever be possible to clean it. If the walkthrough turned up built-up grime, heavy soap scum, or an oven that has clearly never been touched, a deep cleaning handles the accumulated layer that a standard clean is not scoped for.
It also settles the roommate question before it becomes an argument. Everyone starts from the same baseline, and the standard for the rest of the year gets set on day one instead of negotiated in November.
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Timing Around Move-In Week
The two campuses run on different calendars, and it affects how much room you have.
Loyola operates on semesters, and the Rogers Park move-in wave lands in the second half of August. Northwestern is on quarters, so fall classes do not begin until the second half of September, which puts the Evanston wave roughly a month behind.
What both waves have in common is compression. Every lease in the neighborhood turns over inside the same short stretch, which means every cleaner, every mover, and every truck rental in the area is working the same few days. If you are planning to hire anyone, the calendar fills from the outside in. Reaching out well before your move date gives you actual choices about timing instead of taking whatever is left.
And if you are doing it yourself, the same logic applies for a different reason. The empty apartment is the opportunity. Once the boxes are in, it is gone until next summer.