Inspection coming up? Here’s how to make things look like they are under control
WORDS BY WHITNEY DUAN
Let’s face it, your landlord is never going to be your friend. No matter what you tell yourself when you first move it, they’ll always be the suspicious snooping shits, who on inspection day, purse their lips if a hair is out of place.
If you’re just an average living, breathing, socialising student, your overpriced shoebox of a room will be stuffed with books, $5 wines and souvenir allsorts from your last trip to Vietnam. Translation: you’re never going to win on inspection day.
If you’re in the unfortunate position where your house isn’t officially registered to be leased, your landlord may spring surprise inspections - so you’re pretty much fukt if you happen to have had friends over for drinks the night before. Even if you get a 2 week inspection notice, we all know the cleaning doesn't begin until at least 2 hours before they arrive.
So fuck honesty; here’s 5 tips to trick your landlord into believing you’re the perfect tenant.
1) Make your bed m8
Hate to sound like your mum here, but the first part to making your bedroom look acceptable is cleaning up its centerpiece - the bed. Even if you just fold up the sheets and make a stack at the end of the bed, your room will look immediately tidier without the wrinkly mess of pillows and sheets.
2) BOX. EVERYTHING.
Whether it’s in Scandinavian chic IKEA storage boxes, shoved into a battered suitcase, or squashed into 20 shoe boxes you stole from mum’s house, a mess in a box is not a mess at all!
If your landlord is springing an inspection on you, or if you're in that frantic last hour of cleaning, grab whatever it is you have lying around - a half drunk bottle of wine, a reader, that missing sock - and shove it all into a box.
Once you’ve moved the clutter from the floor into some boxes, label them with innocently boring sounding tags (e.g. sewing materials), and stack them under the bed, in the wardrobe or under the sink - the beauty of boxing things is, your landlord is never going to open them!
3) Clothe up
A laundry basket is pretty much a box for your dirty clothes. Clothing strewn around the place is a tell-tale sign of a tenant who doesn’t have their shit together - i.e. you. Invest in a laundry basket with a lid to prevent the inspector from giving you that judgement face for not doing laundry, and to mask the smell of the 2-week-old undies you just found wedged behind the bed. Bonus: If you have anything you really really don’t want your landlord to know about, the best place to hide it is in the bottom of the basket. If you’re that kind of hot mess whose laundry overfills the basket, shove it in the washing machine for temporary storage.
4) *Aerosol spray sound*
How your place smells tells half the story; even if you’ve packed everything away, the smell of a Smirnoff-stained rug or last night’s chicken kebab can give you away.
Some Glen 20 and Spray n’ Wipe, and a few sprays of Mortein can save your ass on inspection day. Even if you don’t have time to wipe down surfaces or kill some crawly critters, you can spray each bottle in random corners of the house to mask unpleasant smells and give the impression that you actually - god forbid - clean your home.
5) Open the damn blinds!
For most of us uni students who spend ¾ of our waking hours in the artificial light of laptop screens, there’s only 2 times when the blinds/windows of our rooms are open; when we move in, and we we move out. Natural light and air is a simple solution to brightening up your home that makes your living areas look immediately cleaner and fresher. Prove to your landlord you’re not a vampire, and open up those curtains just for a little while.
