Aliright, alright. I guess I’m just subjective here. I’m speaking from a freelancer perspective, where I can work anywhere between 0 and 9 hours every day. So after work I’m just too lazy to clean.
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I highly recommend Early Retirement Extreme by Jacob Fisker. He wrote a lot about the dangers of keeping yourself ignorant and incompetent about everything else outside your job (aka specialization or aka outsourcing).
Here’s a little post from his blog on that subject:
"To put it more bluntly, convincing someone that they need you or your services is pretty much the only way to make money these days.
This can be done either directly by promoting specialization and professionalism which is a simultaneous promotion of general incompetence either for lack of skill or for lack of time of all other areas, which thus is a brilliantly sneaky way of keeping the middle class consumer on the hook; or it can be done through shoddy products that break in rapid order and need to be replaced—high depreciation costs are essentially a form of service cost as it is a current liability; or it can be done through a combination buy-in by selling cheap assets but tying them to a service plan like the people who are bonded to their phone and cable services.
Yes, with your college education, your career, your 9-5 job, and you various plans and poorly built environment, you, my friend, are caught! "
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Let me just tell me my experience in Zürich with the last handover. I did decide to do it the mustachian way. We lived just a year in this apartment and were two persons. Not particularly dirty and we cleaned every week. The apartment was old from the 50’s but renovated when it was given to us.
We spent almost a full day cleaning, fixing holes. I spent almost 2 hours just in the bathroom trying to remove 100% of the soap marks on the shower walls. I did a decent job a it but I might not have the best tools and products so yeah it was not 100% perfect. Absolutely not water mark anywhere, so if you wash your hands once or even open the tap the whole things is considered “dirty”. Also you have to clean stuff like to blind shutters to an absolutely spotless degree of cleanliness. Something we forgot to do as we never used those shutter once.
Long story short, the agent was absolutely not satisfied by the level of cleanliness in almost any room. There was always something wrong. It seems they are expecting absolute, 100%, irreproachable flawless cleaning with no water mark anywhere. Otherwise you have to come back. I had not real time for this. Certainly not to spend another 4-6 hours of cleaning and taking the risk to be not good enough again.
Apart from that they also decided to repaint like 100% of the walls because of the holes and some marks made by some IKEA black fabric box that touched the wall. Unrelated but the cost of the whole thing ballooned to > 1000CHF. It was so ridiculous that I exited the handover quite upset to have done all this work for basically nothing.
Do yourself a favour, and hire professionals with guarantee for the cleaning.
Maybe your landlord is willing to make some compromise because your apartment is old or something… But I would not bet on that.
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Thanks for backing me up on this 
That’s an awful story, though.
This is really an horror story…
better to invest some 50-60 bucks in tenant’s protection, they’ll help you discover what your landlord (or agency) has the right to claim and what not…
You were simply taken for a ride, that’s all, happens all the time here because it works and people (especially foreigners) don’t know jack shit about their rights. It can happen regardless whether you paid for a cleaner with guarantee or not. Better pay for someone from Mietverband to come over next time instead if you don’t know how to play this game yourself; it’ll be cheaper and better, chances are the agent won’t try to pull any funny stuff just because of MV guy
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Well I suppose you all live in super expensive and new apartments, because what I’ve seen is totally different.
1st, if you really empty the apartment, there isn’t much light on it. No lamps, just a lamp…which means that it’s harder to see defects. (Sounds like a joke, but I saw it happens to a friend. Do it in winter!)
2nd, if you find the next tenant and he/she’s there with you, you can ask him if he/she want to get the apartment “as is”. If you have it decently cleaned, some people will say yes.
3rd, if you do it by yourself, go and buy some strong cleaner (sorry ecological people)
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100% this
also if you dont have the MV guy, at least know your rights. There is no way you should have to pay > 100chf unless you damaged something.
you could patch the holes with toothpaste, it doesnt matter, they just need to be patched
Interesting discussion. Last time I got an offer for well above CHF 1’000 for 3 rooms. I did it with my girlfriend and we went to the spa in Rheinfelden with Massage in the evening. It took us a bit more than an eight hours day.
Nice blog post from MM also. In general in construction (amd household) you should outsource the things you hate. It makes no sense to do a job you don’t like at all no matter how much cash you save. In my case I h.a.t.e. to fix my bike. I know it’s a 15 Minute job to change a inner tube butit ruins my day so I love to spend CHF 28 on that
We did patch all the holes, with proper mastic, no toothpaste. It didn’t look “perfect” as there was some marks from bricks dust.
I asked for detailed bills from the agency as I didn’t trust them. They did indeed repaint many walls.
But yeah I shouldn’t have probably signed the release and be more difficult. At the end we only had to pay 300CHF for some reason (maybe some insurance kicked in, I am not quite certain) so we were lucky.
You should have used Elmex. There’s no better filler! With some practice you can actually reproduce the grain of the Marmoran structured wall.
I think the boss of the guy that did your Abnahme kicked in…