I moved into a new place in Toronto last month and, being a "I'll just do it myself" person, spent my first weekend deep-cleaning an apartment someone else had lived in. I want to lay out why I would not do that again, as a straight time-value calc.
The thing about a move-in clean is that it is not a normal tidy. You are cleaning a space where you have no idea what the previous tenant did or did not do. That means inside every cabinet and drawer, inside the oven and the fridge, behind the toilet, the inside of the dishwasher, the range hood filter, light switches, and the baseboards, before a single box of yours comes in. Done to an actual standard, that is 6 to 9 hours for a one or two bedroom. I know because I did it.
Here is the calc I should have run first. Take the flat price of a move-in clean and divide it by the hours it would take you to do it to the same standard. If that number is below what an hour of your time is worth, outsource. Mine came out to roughly a third of what I would charge for my own time, which is not a close call.
The input people get wrong is the price, because most cleaners will not give you a number until they are in the unit, which makes the whole thing impossible to plan. So I only get quotes from companies that publish flat rates. For the move I used one that lists move-in cleaning in Toronto at a flat rate sized to the unit, which let me plug a real number into the calc instead of guessing.
The broader point, since this is not a cleaning audience: "just do it yourself" is a decision most people never actually price. Your weekend has a value even when no one is paying you for it. Once you put a number on the hours, a surprising amount of one-time grunt work turns out to be a bad trade, and moving is the clearest example, because you are already out of time and energy exactly when the work is biggest.
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