Moving out from Switzerland.
Eight months ago, we were in the process of moving out from our flat on the outskirts of Bern, ready for the move to Sydney via Blighty.
Moving out of a Swiss rented place is not easy. Inspections are routinely carried out using white gloves and I've known people lose their deposit through forgetting to clean the inside of the light compartment in their oven (whic is also wiped with white gloves).
We'd made a start in the week before the Mrs and kids went back to Blighty, with me staying for another week to finish up. However, Mrs Boris started feeling very peaky and rapidly came down with Swine 'flu.
So, we were not only one person down on the cleaning, but I also had to take time out to look after her (she's awful with even the mildest sniffle).
Anyhoo, time comes for them to go back to Blighty and I get to work on the flat. We're clean enough, but after two years with two small kids, mess can appear in the most unlikely places. I found almost a whole yoghurt adhered to the kitchen wall behind the table leg and a wealth of kids' toys in a ventilation duct.
I won't bore you with the details, but for eight days in the humid Bernese summer, I worked for fifteen, sometimes twenty hours a day to get the place clean. After a couple of days, I started to come down with the 'flu as well and I sweated like a pig in a microwave. I'd managed to get the inspection put off for two days on account of the 'flu, which the agency women were terrified of.
When the landlord came to inspect, I had a left-over bottle of posh Swiss wine (as I don't drink the stuff) and presented it to him for the extra two days stay of execution. He seemed to forget all about inspecting the place and signed it off pretty much there and then.
It was the result I had wanted - no close inspection of the things I had fixed or covered up - but now I was almost incandescent with rage. More than a week of hallucinating while scrubbing walls and floors, cleaning mould from the sealant outside the windows (not to mention all the pink Sarahan dust from a storm which hit just after I had cleaned all the windows and shutters), fishing through ventiliation ducts, scrubbing the inside of an oven till it was as clean as the day it had been installed (not to mention the trays and racks), dusting cobwebs from between the hundreds of spaces between the ceiling panels and all the hundred-and-one-thousand other will-sapping minutae that were required.
I felt like grabbing him by the throat and forcing him to check behind every cupboard door handle, inside every glass lampshade in the hall, wiping the top of every door.
As quickly as it arrived, it passed and I nearly keeled over, noticing I was dripping sweat all over the f***ing bastard of a ceramic kitchen hob - the devil's own bastard to clean without scratching.
He sheepishly shook my hand and left, telling me to leave the keys with the secretary at work.
It wasn't until later that day that I wondered why he was being so deferential and overly nice. I found the next day. The secretary had been supposed to tell me they were keeping half-a-month's rent from my deposit as the new tenants hadn't got round to signing the new contract yet.

Sorry for the lack of lulz. Just had to vent a bit...
( Colonel Boris "...a desperate Buzzfeed imitation...", Tue 30 Mar 2010, 11:22, 2 replies)

I hear you brother
I too lived in Bern and I moved out just before my flatmate who was moving out 3 weeks later. As a result I had to fly back to Switzerland just to help clean the flat before the dreaded inspection. When I arrived back my flatmate told me she's already had two cleaners in going through the whole place but now we needed to 'really clean the apartment'.

I would've left something smelly behind a radiator had it now been for the damn underfloor heating.

Funny how a nation so precise can lose a mountain of Jewish gold eh?
( sneep used to date Freddie Starr's hamster, Tue 30 Mar 2010, 13:18, closed)

go back over there on holiday
find him, and stick a couple of kippers in the exhaust pipe of his car, then firebomb the house.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Tue 30 Mar 2010, 14:57, closed)