Leaving a house is a different beast to leaving a unit. There's a garage, a garden, three toilets, a rangehood nobody has touched since 2023, and kids who keep unpacking the box you just packed. A sensible move out cleaning schedule week before final inspection is the only thing standing between a smooth handover and a scramble at 9pm with a Magic Eraser and a torch. Spring 2026 makes it tighter again — September to November is peak season across Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra, and the good slots are gone weeks out.
What follows is the seven-day countdown our crews actually work to when a family books a house-sized end of lease clean. Adjust the days to your settlement or lease-end date, but keep the order. The order is what saves you.
Why does a house need a full week when an apartment needs two days?
Square metres, mostly. A three-bedroom house with a garage and a yard is typically 160-220sqm of hard floor, ceiling and glass compared to 70sqm in a two-bed flat. But the real difference is the extras: the garage floor with oil drips, the flyscreens, the pergola cobwebs, the letterbox stuffed with junk mail, the garden bed that's gone feral over winter.
Agents inspecting a house also check things they'd never look for in a unit. Gutters near the entry. The hot water cupboard. Under the deck. Whether the lawn's been cut in the last fortnight. And because families accumulate, there's simply more to remove before anyone can clean anything. You can't wipe a skirting board that has a bookshelf against it.
Our rule of thumb: a house takes roughly 1.7 times the cleaning hours of an apartment with the same bedroom count. That's why the calendar matters more than the elbow grease.
Day 7 and Day 6: What should you book and throw out first?
Start with the phone calls, because in spring these are the bottleneck. Book your bond clean, your carpet steam clean and — if you're in a house — anything trades-related: pest treatment if your lease requires it after pets, gutter clearing, a lawn cut. In September and October our Sydney diary fills 10-14 days ahead, and the last Friday of the month is usually gone a fortnight out. Melbourne and Canberra run a week behind but follow the same shape.
Then start the tip runs. Two council hard-rubbish collections won't line up with your dates, so a ute trip to the transfer station (roughly $35-$70 for a car boot to a small trailer load, depending on the council) is money well spent. Target the garage first — it's where families hide the stuff they'll otherwise dump on the lounge room floor at 6am on handover day.
Also on day 7: read your lease. Check whether it names professional carpet cleaning, pest control after pets, or a specific standard for the garden. Pull out your entry condition report and compare photos. If the report says the oven door had a chip when you moved in, you want that noted now, not argued later.
Day 5 to Day 3: Which jobs can you finish before the furniture leaves?
These three days are for everything that doesn't depend on an empty room. Work high and outside-in.
- Oven, grill and rangehood. Pull the racks and filters, soak them overnight in a laundry tub with hot water and a scoop of dishwasher powder. Honestly, skip the supermarket degreaser here — it's too mild for a decade of roast splatter. Overnight soaking does more than scrubbing.
- Windows and tracks. Outside glass, inside glass, sills, then vacuum the tracks with a crevice tool before wiping. Flyscreens come out, get hosed on the lawn, and dry in the sun.
- Light fittings and fans. Every bug graveyard in every oyster light. Ceiling fan blades on top, not just the edges.
- Garage. Once emptied, sweep the whole slab, cobweb the roof beams, and hit oil marks with a degreaser and a stiff broom. Cat litter left overnight will pull fresh oil out of concrete.
- Outdoors. Cobwebs under eaves, pergola, letterbox emptied and wiped, bins washed out and left dry. Mow and edge on day 3 so it still looks sharp at inspection.
Splitting the work like this is exactly what separates a manageable week from a nightmare — the same logic behind our comparison of DIY versus a professional bond clean, where the hidden cost is always the second and third day you didn't plan for.
Day 2: How do you clean rooms as the truck is being loaded?
Removal day is the pivot. The trick is to clean each room the moment it empties, not to wait until the whole house is bare and you're exhausted.
Give one adult the job of "room closer". As the removalists clear a bedroom, that person goes in with a vacuum, a microfibre cloth, sugar soap and a step ladder: cobwebs, wardrobe interior and tracks, skirtings, window sill, door and door frame, light switch, then the floor. Ten to fifteen minutes a room. Then the door shuts and nobody goes back in with muddy shoes.
Wall marks are the big one in family houses. Scuffs behind bedheads, crayon in the hallway, greasy handprints around light switches at kid height. Sugar soap on a damp cloth handles most of it, but go gently on flat or low-sheen paint — scrubbing hard leaves a shiny patch that reads worse than the mark did. Our breakdown of what agents flag on exit reports covers the repair-versus-clean judgement call on each of these.
Pro tip from our crews: photograph every room the second it's empty and clean, with the date on your phone. If your agent's exit report disputes something a fortnight later, timestamped photos of an empty, spotless room end the conversation fast. That evidence, plus our 72-hour free re-clean if anything is flagged, is what actually protects a bond.
Day 1: What does the full bond clean day look like?
This is when the professional clean happens — house empty, power and water still connected, keys not yet handed over. For a family house, expect our team to arrive as a crew of two to four and work five to nine hours depending on size and condition.
The running order is ceiling down, back of house to front door: fans and vents, walls and switches, wet areas, kitchen, floors last. Carpets go in behind us so nobody walks across damp fibre. If you're steam cleaning, allow four to eight hours' drying with windows open — book a morning slot, not a 3pm one. Whether you need it at all depends on your lease and your pets, and we've laid out the NSW position in our guide to carpet steam cleaning and getting your bond back.
House bond clean: typical 2026 timings and prices
| Property | Crew hours | Bond clean (from) | Carpet steam (from) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2-bed house | 4-6 | $330-$420 | $99-$130 |
| 3-bed house | 6-8 | $420-$550 | $130-$170 |
| 4-bed house | 8-11 | $550-$720 | $170-$220 |
| 5-bed house | 10-14 | $720-$950 | $210-$280 |
Prices vary with condition, pets, and add-ons like a double garage or external windows above ground floor. Plug your actual bedroom and bathroom count into our instant estimate calculator and you'll get a figure within a few dollars of the final invoice.
Handover day: what do you check before you drop the keys?
Walk the house with a printed list, not from memory. Cupboards and drawers open and empty. Oven door glass clear between the panes. Shower screen with no film — run the back of your hand down it, you'll feel what your eyes miss. Toilet base and cistern. Dishwasher filter. Washing machine tap area. Every light globe working, because a dead globe is a line item on an exit report more often than people expect.
Then outside: bins empty and clean, garage swept, letterbox clear, lawn edged, no forgotten pot plants or paint tins down the side of the house. Remote controls, spare keys, garage remotes and window winders all in one bag for the agent.
Print our free room-by-room cleaning checklist and tick as you go with a second person. Two sets of eyes catch about a third more than one, every single time.
What goes wrong most often in the spring peak?
Three things, and they're all scheduling.
First, booking the clean for handover morning. If the agent inspects at 11am and your carpets are still damp at 10, you've bought yourself a problem. Clean the day before wherever your lease allows.
Second, underestimating removal day. Trucks run late in October. If your cleaners arrive to a house with a fridge still in the kitchen, they'll clean around it and the agent will find the mess behind it.
Third, leaving the garden. It's the single most common flag on house exit reports in spring, because everything grows in September and nobody thinks of the lawn as "cleaning". Mow, edge, weed the beds, sweep the driveway.
If you want more of the fine detail on the day itself, our hour-by-hour final-day timeline picks up exactly where this countdown ends. And if the week's already looking impossible, tell us your handover date and property size and we'll put together a free quote — we cover houses right across Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra, and we'd rather lock your slot in now than squeeze you in at the eleventh hour.
More on this: End of Lease Cleaning.
