Thanks for all the feedback! There is no mention of cleaning in the lease. There are photos of how the apartment looked at move in attached to the lease. When I moved in there was garbage in all the kitchen drawers and cabinets, and a balcony full of dead potted plants. The place will look better when I move out than when I moved in. But if the landlord wants to ding me for tile grout....so be it.

Our contract kinda sucks...

I think our contract is vague...

And you signed the contract?

Take 200 Bt., kiss it goodby and hire a maid.

How can people be so cheap?

All about pride and respect. I recently moved out of my rented, privately owned, townhouse late last year. I had been there for 7 years and it was a shit fight before I moved in. So bad, I had to pay a cleaner to come in before I moved in.

Moving out. My sense of pride and decency and my good reputation, would not let me walk away and leave it. I just hired the bloke across the road to do it for me. He is out of work and makes a living collecting recyclables and doing odd jobs. I did not negotiate a price with him beforehand, but I was so impressed I gave him 1000 Baht, for he did a bang up job. He was happy, I was happy and the owners were happy.

Which is the Thai way isn't it? and my reputation intact. (As I stayed in the same Moo Baan, where I had bought my own house less than 100 meters away)

If it's not mentioned in your rental agreement, then you are not legally responsible to clean when you move out. This is the law.

Couple of tips though:

If you want to have your deposit back in a timely fashion, I'd suggest to be a courteous tenant who respects others property. As a result, it wouldn't hurt to clean deep the apartment to show that you are a sociable person. It will give you some leverage if you have to claim your deposit.

Hope it helps.

Surely it's all about personal pride and not whats in the contract ? Also if you moved into a place that was in a poor state it's your own fault for moving in. I have always left my old apartments looking much cleaner than when i arrived. A little bit of hard work sometimes but never had problems with any deposits.

I was pretty lucky with the place I stayed in Chiang Mai. I put down a 4000 baht deposit and got it back after 6 months. The place was sort of grubby when I moved in but the bedding was clean, even though a little old. The fridge had some broken parts that I patched with tape, but it worked. There were cobwebs in the ceiling and rings on the drapes were missing, but they also worked. So did the air con. but I only used it a couple of times. Most of the time I just used my own 400 baht fan. For 6 months I did all my own cleaning and took my sheets to the laundry down the road. I only had to pay 300 baht to have the room cleaned when I left, but I left it cleaner than when I move in. It's pretty easy to clean just one room which is the normal size for most Thai apartments. At about 5000 baht for one month with utilities included I thought that was reasonable. It was cheaper than staying at home in Canada and paying the winter heating bill in a house that I own with no mortgage.

Op. You sound like a teenager,that has been asked to clean his bedroom.

Personal pride,I would expect,induce you to leave the room in pristine condition,

After all it shouldn't take more than an hour,tops.

Maybe your floosy could help, for a price of course.

It takes me 2 full days to clean a room of 30m2, that includes all appliances cleaned with a toothbrush at times, floors, bathrooms ( the worst) an hour hahahhahahah I WISH!

SOoooo your still in Prison.

Not your responsibility and a cleaning is normally factored into the price directly or indirectly. You dont need to clean nor should you but that is not to say you should make it any dirtier on the way out either.

Thanks again all! And to those of you who had to either ignore what I wrote and/or imagine much more than I said in order to justify putting me down in your comments, I hope this process made you feel a little better about yourselves. It is all about pride after all!

Edited May 31, 201313 yr by heatwaving

Thanks again all! And to those of you who had to either ignore what I wrote and/or imagine much more than I said in order to justify putting me down in your comments, I hope this process made you feel a little better about yourselves. It is all about pride after all!

It's true there were some biased comments. In order to avoid such unnecessary communication, framing the story a bit differently would be effective. For example, you could have written: "What do Thailand laws say regarding cleaning roles when tenants move out?"

You really get the answers the same way as the question is formulated and understood.

Hey I guess there was still one more person who had to ignore/distort what I wrote to talk down to me! Glad I could help you too.

Anyway, I thought I should follow-up on this. I cleaned my place, like I said I would. I swept the wood floor, but did not scrub it. I got some tile grout out, but definitely not all of it.

My landlord came, looked the place over, and returned my entire security deposit to me. As my Thai friends had predicted, he was really just focused on whether there was damage to anything.

So a happy ending! Thanks again all!