Apartment cleaning tips for Los Angeles renters, from the building in

Start with the building, not the room

An apartment is a smaller job than a house once a cleaner is inside, but how you get inside shifts first. About 68 percent of the city's renter households live in buildings of five or more units, and about 14 percent rent a detached house, so for most renters here the cleaning sits inside a shared building.

A compact one-bedroom near work and a studio off a bungalow court run through the same list, but the walk to the door is different in each. The building shifts how a cleaner reaches the door, while the kitchen and bathroom work itself stays the same. Access is something a caller settles on the call.

The figure below shows renter household size in Los Angeles and the share who live in a studio or one-bedroom.

A small kitchen carries most of the work in a Los Angeles apartment

About half of the city's renter households live in a studio or a one-bedroom. The surfaces are shorter than in a house, but the counter runs hard: the stove, the sink and the fridge are close together, and an evening of cooking leaves a lot on one surface at once.

Wipe the counter at the end of a cooking session, once for crumbs and once for the sticky ring under a bottle or a toaster. Pull the stovetop grates and burner caps off for a soak when the buildup needs it. The hood collects a film that a wipe lifts in short strokes. Renter households in the city are mostly one or two people, with about 37 percent one person and 28 percent two.

The bathroom and the film on the glass

The bathroom in an apartment is small, with many surfaces along a short wall. The shower glass picks up the film first. The USGS calls the spots or film on glassware unsightly but not dangerous.

Keep a squeegee in the shower as a habit after each use. For the lines of grout and the base of the toilet, work with one cleaner at a time. Never mix cleaning products, and no recipes from a video on the counter. The tub or shower goes first because it needs the longest to dry, and the vanity and the mirror go last.

A bathroom fan running during a shower helps the glass dry evenly.

Walkways, courtyards and exterior stairs

Walkways, open courtyards, the laundry room and the exterior stairs that reach a second-story door are shared spaces, and the lease and the building decide who handles them. SurveyLA counts the bungalow court as a multi-family type found throughout Los Angeles, most often built in Craftsman and Spanish Colonial Revival styles in the 1910s and 1920s. The dingbat, the stucco box apartment of 1954 to 1968, is part of postwar Los Angeles and was once common across parts of the city. The inside of your unit is yours; the lease and the building decide who handles the rest.

The small overlap sits at your door: the welcome mat, the inside of the entry door, the threshold and the kick plate. A wipe inside the door picks up a lot, and the mat picks up what would otherwise walk in. The hall itself and the stair treads are the building's work.

The shared green bin and the building's rules

The bins at an apartment building do not match a house's bins. For apartment and condo buildings LA Sanitation serves, each unit gets one 60-gallon black bin and one 90-gallon blue bin, and the property is provided with one 90-gallon green bin shared by all units; a building served by a recycLA service provider works out bin sizes and quantities with the owner or manager. The green bin is shared, not your own.

That matters for the kitchen. Food scraps and food-soiled paper, including coffee filters, napkins, paper towels, greasy napkins and pizza boxes, go in the green bin. A kitchen pail or a small lidded container keeps the trip to the shared bin shorter and tidier.

What the lease and your landlord decide

A few questions sit with the lease, not with any cleaner. Who signs for a service in the laundry room, whether a cleaner can park in the driveway or needs the loading zone, who the front desk calls when a cleaner shows up at the gate: those answers come from the building and your lease. If a cleaner is going to come in and out, tell the building's manager once so the front desk, the gate or the garage are not surprised the first time.

Ask the building what applies to the unit.

A short note left with the manager also helps on days when a cleaner needs the elevator for a few trips, or a parking spot near the entry.

When to hand it to a cleaner

A small place looks easy to keep up until the weeks when it is not. A kitchen used every night, or a bathroom with hard water film climbing the glass, is a point to think about asking for help. A regular visit, every week or every other week, keeps a small unit from a stacking backlog.

A regular maid service fits a steady visit. An apartment cleaning service picks up the whole place at once, with the building's access in mind. A deep clean handles backlogs on the hard water film, the oven and the baseboards. Move-out cleaning and the move-out checklist handle the last day, and what moves the price covers how any of these numbers come together on a call.

What to keep up and what to hand off