How to Clean Your London Rental After a Flatmate Moves Out

A four-bed share on Sandringham Road in Dalston, September, and the three remaining tenants had spent a Sunday scrubbing the whole flat because the one who left had told them the agent would inspect. No inspection was booked. Nobody from the agency had said anything of the sort. They had cleaned an entire three-storey maisonette on a rumour, and the room that needed the work – the empty one, with the blu-tack constellations and the ring of black mould behind the bedhead – had been done last and in a hurry, at half nine at night.

That is the standard shape of this job in London. Effort in the wrong places, panic about a landlord who is not paying attention, and the one thing that would have protected them left undone.

Why is a flatmate move-out not the same job as an end-of-tenancy clean?

Because the tenancy has not ended. Nobody is handing back keys to an empty property, no check-out inventory is being run, and the professional-standard clean written into most London ASTs applies at the end of the term, not when one bedroom changes hands.

What is happening instead is a private handover between people who will mostly never meet. The incoming tenant inherits the state of that room and, in a joint tenancy, a share of liability for the state of everything else. The leaving tenant wants their money. The remaining tenants want a flat that does not smell of somebody else’s cooking oil in three months.

What happens to the deposit when one name changes

On a joint tenancy, the deposit sits in a scheme as one lump against all the names. It does not get partially refunded to one person. What normally happens is that the incoming tenant pays the outgoing tenant directly, and the landlord or agent papers it over with a deed of assignment or a fresh tenancy. Some agents charge a fee for this. Others do it in an afternoon.

The point that matters for cleaning: nothing that happens in this handover is assessed by anyone official. There is no adjudicator. The state of the room is a conversation between the person leaving and the person arriving, and if it goes wrong, that’s a deposit conversation you will be having in eleven months instead, when the whole flat checks out and the damage in the back bedroom has no owner.

What do you do with everything they left behind?

Every London flat share has a corner of abandoned property. A wok. Half a bag of charcoal. Three coat hangers and a router from a provider nobody uses any more.

Message them, in writing, with a list and a photograph, and give a date after which the items go. Two weeks is reasonable and text messages count. Under the Torts (Interference with Goods) Act 1977 you cannot dispose of somebody’s belongings on a whim, and while nobody is going to court over a wok, people have gone to court over a bicycle and a guitar. Written notice with a deadline puts you on solid ground.

The fridge and the shelf they had

Bin everything with their name on it or their handwriting on the lid. Half-jars of harissa, an open bag of frozen prawns of uncertain date – gone. Then pull the fridge shelves out and wash them, because the space they occupied has a year of drip marks under it, and while the fridge is empty is the only convenient moment you will get.

Same for their kitchen cupboard shelf. Empty, wipe with a degreaser, line it if you like, and redistribute properly rather than letting the space stay claimed by a ghost for six weeks.

How do you reset the empty room properly?

This is where the real work is, and where an hour and a half does more good than a whole day spent on the hallway.

Strip it to the walls. Bed out from the corner, wardrobe pulled forward, everything that can move, moved. What lives behind a bedhead in a London rental is a specific ecosystem: dust, wall condensation from a body breathing against a cold external wall all winter, and often a bloom of black mould on the plaster where the airflow stopped. Wipe that with a mould-specific product, let it dwell, and photograph the wall afterwards whether it cleaned up or not.

Blu-tack marks lift with a hairdryer on low and a fingernail, working the grease out of the paint before it sets into a permanent halo. Do it before you wash the wall. Sugar soap on painted walls, tested in a corner, because matt emulsion on a five-year-old repaint will burnish and leave you with a shinier patch than the rest of the room – which reads worse to a landlord than the mark did.

The mattress is the item everyone skips. HEPA vacuum over the whole surface, seams included, slow overlapping passes. Any staining wants an enzyme cleaner and cold water, blotted rather than rubbed, and then a good airing with the window open. If the mattress is protector-less and has visible staining, tell the incoming tenant before they move in rather than after. That’s a deposit conversation you can have now, cheaply, or a furious one later.

Then: inside the wardrobe, top of the wardrobe, curtain rail, light fitting, skirting behind where the desk was, window reveals, radiator fins with a long brush, and the carpet vacuumed slowly in two directions after everything above it is done.

Photograph the finished room

Dated photographs of every wall, the floor, the mattress on both sides, inside the wardrobe, the window. Send them to the incoming tenant before they hand over money, and keep a copy. It takes four minutes and it settles every argument that can arise about this room for the rest of the tenancy. Landlords photograph. Agents photograph. Tenants, almost never, and then they wonder why the record only ever runs one way.

Which shared spaces need attention when one person goes?

Fewer than you think, and different ones than you would guess.

The bathroom, because whoever left has taken their shampoo bottles off the shelf and revealed what was underneath – rings, a scale build-up around the shelf brackets, a shower gel lid welded to the tiles. Twenty minutes.

The kitchen extractor filter, if the departing flatmate was the one who cooked. A metal mesh filter goes in the dishwasher on the hottest cycle, or in the sink with soda crystals and boiling water. Nobody in a house share has ever done this voluntarily.

The hallway and stairs, because moving furniture out scuffs skirting and grinds grit into the carpet on the way. A vacuum and a wipe of the door frames at hand height.

What does not need doing: the whole living room, the other bedrooms, the windows, the oven. None of that is triggered by one person leaving, and doing it now means doing it again at the end of the tenancy.

The smoke and pet exceptions

If the leaver smoked in the room, or kept a cat in it, the reset is a bigger job and the honest answer may be that the room needs sealing primer and repainting rather than cleaning. Nicotine tar goes into emulsion and comes back through fresh paint unless you use a stain-blocking undercoat. A flat off Camberwell Church Street took two coats of shellac primer before the yellow stopped ghosting through, and no amount of sugar soap would have got there.

What is worth paying a cleaning company for here?

Not this. I will put that plainly, at my own expense.

A mid-tenancy room handover does not need a professional clean. No inspection is triggered, no deposit is being adjudicated, and £220 for a two-hour visit to a single bedroom buys you very little that three people with a vacuum, a bottle of degreaser and a Saturday morning cannot achieve. Firms will sell it to you as an end-of-tenancy job because the phrase “flatmate moving out” and the phrase “end of tenancy” sit close together in the mind. They are different products at the same price.

Where it makes sense to pay: a smoker’s room needing more than cleaning, a carpet with a genuine stain problem that wants hot-water extraction, or a share where everybody works long hours and the alternative is that the room stays half-done until December. Then, yes, book someone – for the room and the bathroom, two hours, fixed price, not a whole-flat quote.

Who does what, and who pays

Split it the sensible way: the person leaving does their own room and their own shelf in the fridge, the people staying do the shared spaces they use anyway. Anything bought for the job – sugar soap, an enzyme cleaner, a new toilet brush – comes out of whatever the incoming tenant is paying the outgoing one, agreed by message before anyone starts.

Where this goes wrong is when the leaver has already gone. Three of you scrubbing a room somebody else lived in for two years builds a resentment that lasts, and there is no mechanism to bill them for it afterwards. Get a date in the diary while they still have keys, and be specific about what you expect done rather than trusting to conscience. That’s a deposit conversation avoided for the price of one awkward text.

The three tenants on Sandringham Road took photographs of the empty room the second time round, when the next person left in March. The incoming tenant queried the mould patch behind the radiator. They sent her the picture from six months earlier showing it already there, and that was the end of it.