The Chatswood-to-Turramurra move is one of the most predictable jobs on our spring calendar. Family outgrows a two-bedder near Victoria Avenue, finds a four-bedroom weatherboard up the Pacific Highway with a backyard and a Hills hoist, and suddenly needs move out and move in cleaning on the Sydney North Shore booked within the same week. Two properties, two totally different scopes, two different sets of expectations — one from a property manager with an exit report, one from you and your kids who have to sleep there.
We run both ends of these moves most weeks between September and November. The exit clean at the Chatswood end is a compliance job measured against your entry condition report, which is why an end of lease clean in Sydney is priced and scoped so tightly. The Turramurra end is a hygiene job — someone else's hair in the ensuite drain, their dog's smell in the hallway carpet, twelve years of cooking film on the rangehood. Treat them as the same clean and you'll overpay for one and under-clean the other.
Why can't one clean cover both ends of the move?
Because the standards are set by different people. Your Chatswood agent checks against a document. Oven trays, window tracks, balcony tiles, the inside of the built-in robes, the light diffusers in the kitchen — those get photographed and compared to how the place looked the day you signed. Miss the shower screen scale and you're in a bond dispute over $180 of work.
The Turramurra house has no such document. Nobody is grading it. What matters instead is the stuff a vendor's pre-sale tidy never touched: the top of the kitchen cupboards, the sticky ring inside the pantry where the honey jar lived, the ceiling fans in the bedrooms, the grout in the 1990s bathroom, the inside of the laundry tub cabinet. Older upper North Shore homes also come with their own quirks — leadlight windows, a sunroom nobody dusted since the last owners' grandkids visited, and gum leaf litter blown into every external corner.
Honestly, the biggest difference is timing. The exit clean must happen with the property empty and before your final inspection. The move-in clean is worth far more if it happens before the truck arrives, while the floors are bare and the wardrobes are open.
How much does move out and move in cleaning cost on the North Shore in 2026?
Spring 2026 pricing on the lower and upper North Shore sits roughly where it did in autumn, with a modest lift on houses because of yard and garage work. These are the ranges we quote most often. You can also sanity-check your own place against our current prices and the instant estimate calculator before you ring anyone.
| Job | Typical property | 2026 price range | Time on site |
|---|---|---|---|
| Exit clean, 2-bed apartment | Chatswood tower, one bathroom | $340–$460 | 4–6 hours |
| Exit clean, 3-bed apartment | Chatswood/Artarmon, two bathrooms | $430–$560 | 6–7 hours |
| Exit clean, 4-bed house | Willoughby or Lindfield, garage + yard | $620–$880 | 8–11 hours |
| Move-in deep clean | 4-bed Turramurra house, empty | $480–$720 | 6–8 hours |
| Carpet steam cleaning | Per room, 3-room minimum | $35–$45 | Dry in 2–4 hours |
| Interior + reachable exterior windows | Single-storey house | $180–$320 | 2–4 hours |
All up, most upsizing families we work with spend somewhere between $900 and $1,500 across both ends. That sounds steep until you weigh it against a withheld bond, which on a $900-a-week Chatswood two-bedder is $3,600 sitting in the Rental Bonds Online account you'd quite like back before the first mortgage payment lands.
What does the Chatswood exit clean checklist actually include?
Apartment exit cleans live and die on the small stuff. Our crews work top-down, room by room, and the items agents flag most in Chatswood buildings are consistently these:
- Oven, griller and rangehood — trays, racks, glass door interior, and the aluminium filter degreased, not just wiped
- Window tracks and sliding door channels — vacuumed then wet-detailed; high-rise units collect grit fast
- Balcony — tiles mopped, glass balustrade both sides, drain cleared of leaves and cigarette ash from the floor above
- Shower screen and tap ware — mineral scale removed, silicone free of pink mould
- Inside all robes, drawers and the linen press — including the shelf you can't see without a torch
- Skirtings, door frames, switches and aircon filters
- Bin room, car space and storage cage — strata areas your agent can and does inspect
Print something and tick as you go. Our free room-by-room cleaning checklist is the same document our teams work from, so if you're splitting jobs with a partner you're at least arguing about the same list.
Pro tip: take date-stamped photos of every room the moment the cleaners leave and before you hand keys back. If your agent flags anything on the exit report, we return and re-clean it free within 72 hours — and photos make that conversation take two minutes instead of two weeks.
What should the Turramurra move-in deep clean cover?
Vendors clean for a photo shoot, not for a family with a toddler. What we find in upper North Shore houses at handover is fairly consistent: dust on picture rails, spiderwebs under the eaves and along the verandah, a fridge cavity with crumbs in it, and bathroom grout that needs a proper acid-safe scrub rather than a spray and wipe.
A full deep clean of the whole house before the truck arrives covers ceiling fans, light fittings, all cupboard interiors, skirtings, tracks, grout, laundry, garage floor sweep and the inside of the old wall oven. We also wipe every internal door handle and light switch, which sounds fussy until you remember five people's hands were on them last week. Allow six to eight hours for a four-bedder and get it done the day before the removalists — an empty house cleans in two-thirds of the time and costs you less.
Extras worth adding at the new place
- Windows inside and out while there's no furniture to move
- Flyscreen wash — upper North Shore gums clog them within a season
- Hard floor polish or seal check on old blackbutt or tallowwood boards
- Fridge and dishwasher cavity clean before the new appliances slide in
Do carpets need doing at both ends?
At the Chatswood end, usually yes. Most NSW leases require professional steam cleaning if carpets were professionally cleaned at the start of the tenancy, and agents want a paid receipt with the company name on it. Pet-friendly buildings almost always require it. The detail on what's enforceable is covered properly in our guide to whether you need carpet steam cleaning to get your bond back in NSW, so we won't repeat it here.
At the Turramurra end it's a choice, but it's the one we'd make every time. Hot water extraction on bedroom carpets before the beds go in pulls out the previous owners' dander, dust mite allergens and that faint dog smell that otherwise lingers for months. In September, with mild days and open windows, carpets are dry in two to four hours — quick enough to steam in the morning and move furniture in that afternoon.
How do you schedule both cleans when the dates overlap?
This is where families come unstuck. Settlement runs late, the lease ends on a Wednesday, and the removalist can only do Saturday. Our preferred order, which works for about nine out of ten of these moves:
- Day 0 — keys to the new house. Meter reads, alarm codes, locks checked.
- Day 1 — move-in deep clean at Turramurra. House empty, six to eight hours, carpets steamed last.
- Day 2 — removalist day. Furniture into a clean house.
- Day 3 — exit clean at Chatswood. Unit completely empty, including the storage cage.
- Day 4 — final inspection. Leaves a clear day for any touch-up.
If your lease genuinely ends before you get the new keys, flip steps one and three and pay for a few nights of overlap — it's cheaper than a rushed bond clean around stacked boxes. The last-day logistics, from meter photos to remotes and mailbox keys, are all in our handover day checklist, which we hand to every family running a two-end move.
What goes wrong most often, and how do you avoid it?
Three things. First, booking too late — September to November is peak on the North Shore and Saturday slots go two to three weeks out. Second, leaving the garage, yard or storage cage off the exit scope, then copping a $200 rubbish removal charge. Third, assuming a same-day clean can happen around a half-packed house; it can't, and the bond back guarantee only holds when we clean an empty property.
Fixed price confirmed before we start, police-checked and insured cleaners, and a free re-clean inside 72 hours if your property manager flags a single line item. Tell us both addresses, the bedroom and bathroom counts and your key dates, and we'll quote both ends together — get a free quote for your two-end move or call us on 0468 490 764 and we'll block out the dates while they're still there.
More on this: End of Lease Cleaning in Sydney.
