Move-In Inspection Checklist: What to Photograph (Room by Room)

You get exactly one chance to document the condition you received the unit in: move-in day, before your boxes hide the floors. Ten minutes of systematic photos is the difference between “prove it” and proof when the deduction letter arrives a year later.

The method: every room, same five shots

1. Wide shot from the doorway — establishes the room and that nothing is staged.
2. Floors — stains, scratches, worn paths, damaged boards or tiles.
3. Walls and ceiling — holes, marks, water stains, peeling paint.
4. Windows, blinds, and locks — cracked panes, bent slats, anything that doesn’t latch.
5. Close-ups of anything already wrong — get within arm’s length; a scratch that’s visible at 12 inches is invisible at 12 feet.

Room-specific extras

• Kitchen: inside the oven, fridge, and dishwasher; under the sink (water stains = pre-existing leaks); counters and cabinet faces.
• Bathroom: grout and caulk lines, tub/shower enamel, under-sink cabinet, exhaust fan.
• Bedrooms: closet interiors, carpet corners (pet-stain territory), window seals.
• Entry/hall: door faces and frames both sides, baseboards, light switches.
• Everywhere: test every smoke detector and photograph it — some states fine tenants for missing ones.

Make the photos hold up later

A camera-roll photo is better than nothing, but it has two problems in a dispute: dates in phone metadata are trivially editable, and photos scattered across a camera roll die with a lost phone. What makes photo evidence persuasive is provenance — proof of when it was taken and that it hasn’t been altered.

That’s DepositShield’s whole job: each photo is fingerprinted (SHA-256) the moment you shoot it and independently timestamped by our servers, then compiled into a PDF report you email your landlord on day one — putting the unit’s condition on the record before any dispute exists.

The last step everyone skips

Send the report to your landlord the same day. An inspection your landlord received on move-in day is nearly impossible to argue with; one that surfaces for the first time during a dispute invites “you took those later.” Day-one delivery is the move. (Start your walkthrough — the first room takes five minutes.)

Michigan renters: your state requires inventory checklists at move-in and move-out — details here.