Every room cleaned before the photographer arrives

We clean the listing before photos

Listing photos go up once, and they stay with the house for as long as it is for sale. That is why we book the clean as close to the photo shoot as the schedule allows, after the painters and the movers are finished. Anything that happens in the house after we leave puts dust and footprints back on the floor. A buyer scrolling on a phone will notice them before they notice the kitchen.

We work from the top of each room down. Ceiling fans and air vents come first, because whatever is on them ends up on the floor. Then the switch plates and door handles get wiped, and the window tracks get vacuumed out. The kitchen and bathrooms come next. Faucets and mirrors get polished last so nothing splashes on them afterward. The floors are the final job, and we finish at the front door.

Candee is a licensed REALTOR, so we plan this clean from the listing side of the sale. The agent opens the door for every buyer, and the first thing anyone notices is how the house smells. After that, buyers start opening things. They pull out drawers, look inside the oven and open the fridge. Those get wiped out even when they look clean, because a crumb in an empty drawer looks like a house nobody took care of.

• Ceiling fans and vents dusted first
• Mirrors and glass wiped streak free
• Baseboards and window sills cleaned by hand
• Inside of drawers and cabinets wiped out
• Floors vacuumed and mopped on the way out

Listing photos show every streak and smudge

A listing photographer usually shoots with a wide lens and every light in the house turned on. That setup makes a room look big. It is also hard on glass and anything shiny. A streaked mirror or a hand print on a stainless fridge turns into a bright smear in the picture. Some of it can be edited out later, but that costs the photographer time and it rarely looks right.

So glass gets cleaned twice. We do the mirrors, the oven door, the shower glass and the inside of every window we can reach. Then we go back over each one with a dry cloth and look at it from an angle, the way a camera would see it. Stainless steel gets wiped with the grain. Faucets and cabinet pulls get dried off so the chrome has no water spots.

Newer builder homes around Fort Mill usually have white trim and flat wall paint. White trim shows every scuff, so the baseboards and door frames get wiped by hand. Flat paint is the tricky part. Scrub it too hard and that spot turns shiny, and a shiny patch catches the light worse than the scuff ever did. So walls get a light touch with a damp cloth, and any mark that stays gets pointed out to the agent.

Empty houses get dirty while they sit

An empty house in York County does not stay clean on its own. Summers here are hot and humid, and owners often set the air high or shut it off once they move out. A closed house in that heat can start to smell musty, and moisture settles into grout lines and shower corners. We clean those spots, but if the smell comes back after a clean, we tell the agent the air settings need a look.

Plumbing that nobody uses causes its own trouble. The water that sits in every drain trap slowly dries up, and once it is gone, sewer smell can drift up into the room. Toilets left alone grow a ring at the water line, and it gets harder to scrub out the longer it sits. So we run every tap and flush every toilet before we clean the bowls. If anything drips while we are there, the agent hears about it.

Spring brings the yellow pine pollen that coats everything in the Carolinas for a few weeks. It blows in every time the front door opens and settles on the sills and the entry floor. Fall brings bugs looking for a warm spot, and a closed house ends up with dead ones on the sills and inside the light globes. New neighborhoods are still going up around Fort Mill, and the red clay from those lots tracks onto carpet fast.

We refresh the house while it sells

The house buyers see on the first weekend is the one in the photos. A few weeks later, it may not be. Every showing brings in shoes, and every agent flips the same light switches and opens the same doors. Dust also keeps settling on counters and floors, even with nobody living there. A listing refresh puts the house back the way it looked on photo day, so the next buyer sees what the listing promised.

A refresh is lighter than the first clean. We walk the house the way a buyer would, starting at the front door, and take care of what the showings left behind. That usually means the floors, the kitchen counters, the sinks and toilets, and any glass that got touched. We check the sills and light globes for bugs again too, since they keep getting in as long as doors open and close.

A refresh makes sense at a few points while a house is listed. One is right before new photos are taken on a listing that has sat for a while. Another is after a price change, when a new round of buyers starts booking showings. It also helps when the owners have already moved away and nobody is around to notice the dust. Call or text (704) 493-9636 and tell us where the house is.