What to photograph and log before you move out of a rented flat

Security deposit disputes almost always come down to the same problem: it's your word against the landlord's about what condition the flat was in when you moved out, versus when you moved in. Whoever has documentation wins that conversation. The record needs to exist before the dispute starts, not after — which means the right time to build it is move-in day, not move-out day.

Move-in: the baseline everything else gets compared against

The single highest-value thing you can do on move-in day is photograph every wall, floor, fixture, and appliance before you've moved a single box in — an empty room photographs existing damage far more clearly than one with furniture and belongings in the frame. Walk every room with a phone camera and take wide shots of each wall plus close-ups of anything already imperfect: a scuff, a stain, a hairline crack, a scratch on a countertop, a chip on a tile. Landlords and outgoing tenants both tend to remember the big stuff and forget the small stuff, and it's almost always the small stuff that becomes a dispute.

Beyond photos, log the specifics that a photo alone won't capture: whether each appliance switches on and holds temperature, whether taps and drains work without leaking, whether locks and latches function, and the exact reading on any meters at handover. If your rental agreement lists an inventory of furnishings, check every item against that list rather than assuming it's accurate — discrepancies are far easier to raise on day one than on the day you're trying to get your deposit back.

During the tenancy: log changes as they happen, not from memory

A pipe leaks, a landlord's electrician does minor repair work, a fixture starts making noise before it eventually gets replaced — small events like these are easy to forget entirely by the time you move out a year or two later, and "I think there was some water damage that got fixed" is a much weaker claim than a dated photo and a one-line note from when it happened. The habit that pays off is logging maintenance events as they occur — what happened, when, and who was told — rather than trying to reconstruct a timeline from memory during the move-out walkthrough.

Move-out: repeat the same walk, room by room

Do the exact same photo pass you did on move-in — same rooms, same angles where possible, empty of your belongings. The comparison is what matters, so consistency between the two sets of photos is more valuable than either set on its own. Note the current condition of anything you flagged as already-damaged at move-in, since that's the strongest evidence that existing wear isn't yours to pay for. If your landlord does a walkthrough with you, ask for anything discussed verbally to be confirmed in writing or a message afterward — a verbal "that's fine, don't worry about it" carries very little weight if the deposit gets partially withheld two weeks later.

Why this is worth structuring, not just dumping in a camera roll

A phone's camera roll works until you need to find "the photo of the bathroom tile from fourteen months ago" among three thousand unrelated photos, at which point it stops being useful exactly when you need it most. Keeping the record structured by room and by item — rather than by whatever order you happened to take the photos in — is what makes it usable months or years later, when the dispute (if there is one) actually happens.

Gharlog keeps this kind of record structured from day one: photos, notes, and dates attached to specific rooms and items rather than buried in a general photo library. Explore Gharlog to set up a move-in record before your next lease starts.