Before checkout at a Michigan cabin rental you are expected to do a short handoff list, not a cleaning job. The dishes, the trash, the grill, the thermostat, the towels. Simple Lyfe Stays manages 44 doors across Oceana, Mason, Mecosta, Newaygo, Lake, Kent and Muskegon counties, and the departure instructions are stored per property rather than written once for the whole company. That is the part guests do not expect. The cabin you booked has its own list, the tasks on it are genuinely small, and two of our cabins forty minutes apart will ask you for different things.
Do you have to clean a cabin rental before you leave?
No. Cleaning a cabin rental is paid work that happens after you go, and the cleaning fee on your reservation is what pays for it. What you are asked to do is a handoff, meaning a few steps that tell the next person what happened in the house. Wiping counters and pushing a vacuum around are not on our lists. The dishes usually are, and so is the trash, because food sitting in a closed cabin for a day is a different problem than a dusty floor.
Do you strip the beds at a vacation rental?
No, and at our cabins the written instruction is the opposite of the habit. The departure note at Dragon House in White Cloud, Newaygo County reads "leave used beds unmade," and the same wording sits in the notes for Pickerel Lake Waterfront Cottage in Newaygo County and Hillside Cabin in Sparta, Kent County. An unmade bed is information. It tells the cleaner which beds were slept in, which sheets have to come off, and which room can be looked at and left alone. Strip every bed in a three-bedroom cabin and that information is gone, so the laundry doubles for no reason at all.
Where do the used towels go?
Used towels go wherever that particular cabin keeps its laundry, which is why the instruction is not the same at any two of them. At Dragon House the note says the laundry room. At Pickerel Lake it says the laundry area. At Hillside Cabin it says the bathroom, and that is because Hillside has no washer and dryer on site, so there is no laundry room to carry them to. The sentence quietly encodes the floor plan. If you ever want to know whether a cabin has laundry before you book, the towel instruction is a more reliable tell than the photos.
Do you have to do the dishes at a cabin rental?
Yes, and the dishes are the task that varies most from one cabin to the next. At Pickerel Lake Waterfront Cottage the instruction is to wash all the dirty dishes and put them away, by hand, and that kitchen is recorded without a dishwasher to help. Other cabins ask you to load a machine and start it on your way out the door. Those are different amounts of work and different amounts of time, and the difference is invisible in a listing photo. Read the one sentence in your own arrival message rather than going by the cabin you stayed in last summer.
What do you do with the trash?
Trash is the only departure task with a date attached, and the date is set by the local pickup schedule rather than by us. Pickup at Pickerel Lake is Wednesday, and if the can is not already at the end of the driveway, the instruction asks you to push it up to the top of the hill. Pickup at Dragon House and at Hillside Cabin is Monday. Dragon House asks you to bring the can to the curb only if your stay runs through Monday morning and the can is full, which reads as fussy right up until you are the guest arriving at a cabin whose can has been full for six days.
What about the hot tub and the grill?
Turn the gas grill off, and if the hot tub is electric, add chlorine at the end of each day you use it. Grill-off is on the list at all three of these cabins. The hot tub instruction is narrower than most guests expect. Dragon House asks for one capful of chlorine at the end of each day's use. Hillside Cabin asks for half a capful of chlorinating granules and for the cover to be closed whenever the tub is not in use. Pickerel Lake asks for nothing at all, because its tub is wood-fired and has no chemistry to hold between soaks. One amenity, three different jobs.
What time do you have to be out?
Checkout at all three of these cabins is 10:00 AM and check-in is 4:00 PM. Those six hours are the entire turnover: the drive between doors, the laundry, the full clean, the restock, and the walk-through. A late departure does not cost the host an hour. It costs the next family their arrival, which is the real reason a checkout time that looks early on a vacation is the one rule hosts almost never bend.
One more line shows up word for word in our departure notes: set the air conditioning to 75 in warm weather and the heat to 65 in cold weather. In a Michigan October it is the second half that matters. Browse our western Michigan cabins, and when the arrival message lands, read the departure paragraph once on your first morning instead of your last. It takes a minute, and it is the whole list.