[Closed] Cleaners

4 hours per fortnight
£11 per hour
South Manc

2hrs a fortnight, about 25quid a pop, London.

Money very well spent, completely negates the BS need to do deep clean on Sunday when you’ve worked all week.

4hrs @ £13 per hour in Scotland
She is like a Duracell bunny though - never stops once she takes her coat off.
Money well spent just keeping the kitchen and bathrooms nice.

4hrs every fortnight (actually 2hrs with two people).

£13/hr, £52 total.

Surrey.

How is that even close to enough? Presumably some cleaning is done at some point on the other days? One clean every week just wouldn't cut it for our household.

Thank you all, keep it coming.

How is that even close to enough?

It's not of course, but we do still live here and are doing housework ourselves too. I'm just looking to lighten the load a little.

You obviously keep it tidy during the week - cleaner does the deep clean bits.

What does "deep clean" mean in this context?

2 hours per week £11/hr Cornwall. Dusts, cleans the floors kitchen and bathroom.

Three hours ish, if it’s done quicker, it’s done quicker, fifty quid.

£11/hr in Devon plus all the local gossip(priceless)

£40 for 3 hours every other week.

Through an agency in Newcastle.

There's only 2 of us, with more people you might want a bit more regularly.

2 hrs a week, £25. Hertfordshire

So tempted, but MrsMC- who causes most of the mess but does little of the cleaning - doesn't see the need. One of the reasons I work a 4 day week is so I can spend a couple of hours cleaning.

Ours comes round every week and is £20. She probably spends a good couple of hours going around the place and does a great job. But be warned...a good cleaner is hard to find (got Fergal Sharkey going on in my head as I typed that). We went through a few before finding our current one and are sticking with her. She's brill.

£40 for three hours, once a week. We have had the same one for over 11 years. She is lovely and occasionally makes us a brilliant Thai green curry.

I'm so gonna do this. I detest spending time cleaning. Do you all just give them a key and let them crack on?

my wife does this, charges £11 p/h. most of her customers are elderly and enjoy the chat whilst she cleans, but some will give her a spare key if its whilst theyre at work.

id guess most would be 2 hrs per week although one bigger house asks her to clean for 5 hrs each week.

shes had a variety of clients over the years spanning the full range from 'sod this we've got a cleaner, i'm not lifting a finger' to 'the cleaner will be round soon, dont want her to see it like this" 🙂

The good thing about having a cleaner is that it makes you clean before the cleaner arrives so they don't think you're a slovenly scruffy ****. Or it did with us......

Edited to add - beaten by 4 minutes

That's almost certainly what would happen here, yes.

A mate has always had a cleaner as he and his wife both worked silly hours.

I discovered this when I was staying with them for a few days and found a strange woman in the dining room as I walked through from having a shower in their downstairs bathroom.

Oh how we laughed.....

2 hrs per week for us. It does make us clean up before hand or at least keep the house tidy.

During lockdown I’ve spoken more to the cleaner and post person more than almost anyone else!

Edit £140 a month which seems expensive compared to some on here! That is via a company ‘poppies’ so maybe that makes a difference. Based in midlands.

I discovered this when I was staying with them for a few days and found a strange woman in the dining room as I walked through from having a shower in their downstairs bathroom.

you are robin askwith AICM £5.

1.5hrs a week, £10 an hour. Near Cambridge.
With 2 young kids and us both working those 1.5hrs are definitely worthwhile.
House tidied after kids go to bed, kitchen kept clean. Tables wiped, spillages cleared up. The cleaner does the rest

you are robin askwith AICM £5.

A friend walked in to his bathroom after work one day to find that his cleaner cleaned the shower naked. She was about 60 and had had a hard life so it wasn't quite fantasy situation

A friend walked in to his bathroom after work one day to find that his cleaner cleaned the shower naked. She was about 60 and had had a hard life so it wasn’t quite fantasy situation

A colleague returned to the office late one night to find another male colleague hoovering the office stark naked. It seems the hooverer was some sort of pervert. Also the office had a proper cleaner so doubly wierd.

fwiw most folks I know have someone for about 4 hours a week, we run a bit more.  Belgium since 2004 has had this system where households pay 8 squids an hour for someone to an agency.  The agency pay the people about 10 an hour and in addition they get holiday pay, end of year bonus and social security covered.  I think it costs the government in total about 20/hour. The idea was to move folks out of the black economy, give them rights as well as making it easier for households to find people to do the work. Appears to work well for most folks on both side of the deal

A colleague returned to the office late one night to find another male colleague hoovering the office stark naked. It seems the hooverer was some sort of pervert. Also the office had a proper cleaner so doubly wierd.

I used to have one of those next door. Up at all hours, shoving the vacuum cleaner about with all the lights off. Weird bloke, he used to keep birds of prey in his back yard too.

His antics eventually got him into the papers. "Hawk Kestrel Man Hoovers in the Dark."

Bravo Cougar. 👏👏👏

🙄

In related news,

I've just cleaned the bathroom as 'requested' by my other half. In the cabinet under the sink where the cleaning products naturally live I found, amongst other things:

Four near-empty bottles of bleach (like, you squeeze the bottle and you get a 'thbbbbb' noise rather than delivering any product).
Two near-empty bottles of bathroom cleaner.
Two near-full bottles of bathroom cleaner.
A bottle of ceramic hob cleaner (we do not have a ceramic hob in the house at all, let alone in the bathroom).
A posh face cloth.
A nit comb.
A tub of table salt.

WHY?! WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO ME, WOMAN?!

Epsom, 3 bed house with 2 people and no pets. We pay £36 every week for 2 ladies to clean. No idea how long they take as we are at work but they do a brilliant job.
Shame they've been stuck in Brazil since Christmas.
I miss them.
Edit. our friend has a £4 million ,7 bed house with just her in it as the kids are at uni. She has a cleaner every day in the week and he seems to be there all day , he earns more than me.
A very ,very cushy number.

Decadenttrackworld.com

I've had a cleaner pretty much my entire working life, and so did my folks.

Takes about 4 hours a week, but we've a decent sized place and a couple of dogs.

We do 'clean' up after ourselves, but don't hoover/dust etc and both hate clutter - so the place is always tidy.

Life is too short.

WHY?! WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO ME, WOMAN?!

Do we share a wife?

MrsDoris used to do this around Dalston / Stoke Newington in the 90s. She once got shouted at by David Baddiel (who was next door) for turning the stereo up too loud

WHY?! WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO ME, WOMAN?!

Is this a humblebrag that you haven't even opened the cupboard with the cleaning stuff for the last four years?

A colleague returned to the office late one night to find another male colleague hoovering the office stark naked. It seems the hooverer was some sort of pervert. Also the office had a proper cleaner so doubly wierd.

😆 😆

Is this a humblebrag that you haven’t even opened the cupboard with the cleaning stuff for the last four years?

We recently moved house. Prior to moving I was the only one who cleaned the bathroom ever. After moving it's a joint task and she's too efficient.

our friend has a £4 million ,7 bed house with just her in it as the kids are at uni. She has a cleaner every day in the week and he seems to be there all day , he earns more than me.

Self-explanatory, no?

My thoughts exactly....

We had cleaners for years, but as others have said it can be tricky getting good ones. On the one hand agencies mean it's easier to complain and ask for someone else because this lot didn't do a good job or left the windows open, but OTOH using agencies means you get a variety of standards...

Our last cleaner it was the madness that we couldn't take any more - we found she'd been going on one of the computers (that took a bit of unwinding as she didn't realize you had to be logged in to FB *as you* so she'd friended all these people...), taken the dog (30+kg, high prey drive breed) out for a walk, used our washer and dryer (alien black lace underwear found in dryer) and left a growing pile of shoes in our cupboard.

We dispensed with her and the shoes and spent the money on supermarket deliveries, robot hoover + mop, and packets of wipes and bottles of Viakal everywhere.

Oh and she used to perfume the dogs (!)

Decadenttrackworld.com

My dad used to make me hoover and tidy up every Saturday, I hated it with such a passion that I would do it at 06.00am just to wind him up. I vowed pretty much at that point that life is too short to spend it pushing a hoover around.

Pretty dull as a rags to riches story, but I put it firmly in the bottom rung of my own personal Maslow's hierarchy.

“Hawk Kestrel Man Hoovers in the Dark.”

This deserves more recognition.

We had a cleaner. paid about £12 per hour. She was rubbish though so we sacked her. We then went on holiday and, whilst we were away, she came into our house and stole about £12k worth of jewellery and clothes. We are not flash but my wife had some old and very valuable jewellery handed down through four generations of her family, all gone. She stole some of my wife's clothing. She stole some bottles of champagne. She even stole money out of my kids piggy banks.

Police got a warrant and raided her house but she had moved it on by then. One her her cousins rocked up at work wearing my wife's jacket! Police couldn't charge her even though she was seen coming in to our house by a neighbour. Insurance wouldn't pay out as she had one of our keys so no forced entry.

I tracked down previous customers of her and, between all of us, I estimated around £70k worth of theft. I tried really hard to get the police to look at it as connected crimes but they refused to join the dots, each crime was just investigated by whichever PC was on duty when it was called in. The PC investigating our theft didn't even know that she had been questioned for similar theft three months earlier until I told her. The police had taken away my wife's (now empty) antique jewellery box for finger printing. They then lost it and she never got it back. It was the final insult.

Eventually the police just said no further action would be taken.

We no longer use cleaners.

Bloody hell.

She once got shouted at by David Baddiel (who was next door) for turning the stereo up too loud

If I lived next door to David Baddiel, I'd put on a sample of a football crowd singing 'he's' got a pineapple, on his head', at full volume, on constant repeat. Then I'd go out for the day. Or on holiday for a couple of weeks.

She used our washer and dryer (alien black lace underwear found in dryer)

oh aye...

I couldn't employ a cleaner for the same reason I could never be a traffic warden.

.

Self-explanatory, no?

Kind of... as in, it's a mansion so he's bound to be there all day. Or the other thing I immediately thought?..

Fair play to her for challenging the traditional orthodoxy though

It’s usually the personal trainer

Serious answer.

I just don't think I could get a cleaner....

I'd feel I was abandoning my roots somehow, that working class pride in having worn out, but immaculately shined shoes, the satisfaction in perfectly streak free windows.

I think it also comes from being a domiciliary care worker for years, a big part of that (when we had time, years ago) was cleaning. It was a matter of pride that when you left someone's house it was immaculate.
I also come from one of those areas where it was still common to see people donkey stoning their steps, blokes washing completely worn out cars every week, all that nonsense.

I quite enjoy a good clean. I find it very therapeutic.
And, if I'm honest, now, as a nurse I like cleaning down the ward every couple of hours.
It feels like honest graft.

Perfect.

What are your rates, and when can you pop round?

What are your rates, and when can you pop round?

Surely he'll be paying you for his 'therapy'?

I’d feel I was abandoning my roots somehow, that working class pride in having worn out, but immaculately shined shoes, the satisfaction in perfectly streak free windows.

I think your decadent guilt is very misplaced. There was nothing romantic about the working class days.

Back in the 'working class' days it was probably the stay at home housewife that shined her husbands shoes while he was putting in a shift shovelling coal down 'pit, in between cooking his dinner for a number of hours in a log fired oven while running a feather duster around a small 2 up and 2 down damp, leaky and draughty terrace house and whacking the hell out of rugs with a stick, scrubbing the living daylights out of the tiled floor on her hands and knees and running the washing through a mangle. And when her husband returned from the pub tanked up on warm flat brown beer, felt lucky she didn't only received a slap or two from him and not the beating with the belt. Yeah...them good old working class days. A real sense of achievement for your daily chores.

These days women are educated, they work and have their own careers - some owning and running domestic cleaning companies, own their own homes, own their own cars, and increasingly often pay someone to do the washing and ironing, pamper themselves at the weekend, travel the world on holidays etc. That's progress. You can stick the overly romanticised 'good old' working class days into the dustbin of history. I think most people who lived in the old working class days would take life today in a heartbeat.

I’d feel I was abandoning my roots somehow

Nah, **** that shit. We all work stupid long hours in stressful jobs with minimum free time, and phones and texts that impinge even on that free time. I'm not going to spend precious time off pushing a hoover about, or smearing windolene about. Not when I can get a professional to do it for me.

I have a fairly decent professional job and a busy life and there's no way I'd pay someone to clean for me, but I do live in Yorkshire... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’d feel I was abandoning my roots somehow, that working class pride in having worn out, but immaculately shined shoes, the satisfaction in perfectly streak free windows.

You want a medal? Nobody's going to give you a medal. Most wouldn't give you the steam off their piss. Let alone decent wages, recognition and respect.

You can stick the overly romanticised ‘good old’ working class days into the dustbin of history. I think most people who lived in the old working class days would take life today in a heartbeat.

Too ****ing right. The romanticisation of the 'working classes' is a middle class affectation, to assuage their privileged guilt. 'Oh look at the honest, hardworking salt of the earth working classes', they coo, as they ignore poverty and hardship they never have to face themselves. What's worse, in many ways, are people who claim to be 'working class', then you discover they actually come from a lower middle class background where parents were academics or middle managers, went to a selective grammar type school, lived in some nice suburb, owned a car or two and holidayed abroad 2 or 3 times a year. IE, just not 'posh', but quite a way off having to actually graft hard in some menial job, to survive. Like being 'working class' is somehow glamourous. **** that.

I'm not romanticising anything.

For me, it's about self respect and the satisfaction of a job done well.

I'm not judgemental about it, people are just different.

I would never pay for my car to be cleaned, or my work shoes to be shined, I just prefer to do it myself.

A friend paid for 2 hours per week cleaning pre covid, during covid he found that the 2 hours had been split between 4 people and they spent 30mins in his house blitzing it before leaving.

As much as I do like deep cleaning the house since mini-oK arrived I find I have less time and from this thread am tempted to get someone for a couple of hours a fortnight

I’m not romanticising anything.

But:

working class pride

That's 'romanticising' being working class, in my book. What's wrong with not having someone else do manual tasks for you? Are you not 'good enough'? Don't you 'deserve' that? Or is such only for 'better' people?

Not at all.

There's nothing romantic about being proud of a job well done.

I pay for builders and decorators, because I'm crap at both those things.
I don't feel guilty about it in the slightest.

But I do take pride in the fact that I keep my own car, shoes, house etc clean and get a certain amount of satisfaction in doing so.

There’s nothing romantic about being proud of a job well done.

No. Nobody is saying that. But then why mention your 'class'? Nobody talks of 'middle class pride', do they? This 'working class pride' thing is a myth propagated and perpetuated by ruling classes, who would very much like the proles to stay in their place, and not get ideas above their station. Forget 'working class'; you're a nurse, so immediately of far greater social importance than any ****ing banker or 'project manager' or whatever bullshit job you can think of. Don't pigeonhole yourself according to someone else's made up values. Have pride in yourself.

But I do take pride in the fact that I keep my own car, shoes, house etc clean and get a certain amount of satisfaction in doing so.

Our bathroom is sparkling, because I put a lot of effort into keeping it that way. It's the envy of all our friends. I'll jet wash the bins (we share with 2 other households) not because it's my 'job', but because I know I'll do a much better job than any other bugger. But **** painting and decorating; more than happy to let someone else do that. And as for cleaning; we live in a modest flat, not some sprawling pile full of children and animals, and getting someone in to clean it would just be downright lazy. But cleaning, like collecting the bins, unblocking drains etc, are vital jobs that need doing, and should not be relegated to their 'lowly' status. Sure, most people don't like doing them, but hey, they have to be done, and not everyone can ponce around being graphic designers or ****ing 'project managers', can they? 😀

 And as for cleaning; we live in a modest flat, not some sprawling pile full of children and animals, and getting someone in to clean it would just be downright lazy.

The very first thing I did when I got my first flat was arrange for cleaners to come in. When she saw it she laughed and said I have to pay by the hour but it wouldn't take that long to clean, which I said, that's cool just take a load off when you're done. My flat was always spotless, and it was the cleaning firm's favourite job as they essentially got to have a paid break...winner winner chicken dinner

But then why mention your ‘class’? Nobody talks of ‘middle class pride’, do they? This ‘working class pride’ thing is a myth propagated and perpetuated by ruling classes, who would very much like the proles to stay in their place, and not get ideas above their station.

Because I come from a working class, socialist background 🙂
And despite the efforts of various governments I'm proud of the fact that my parent's generation fought hard for social justice whilst refusing to conform to the stereotypes of those who would denegrate them as a feral, ignorant underclass.

Because I come from a working class, socialist background

So do I. But I don't bang on about having some kind of 'working class pride'. Because that's just bollocks. Nobody aspires to be 'working class'; wearing it as a badge of honour is merely marking your position in the social stratification as created by the ruling classes.

And despite the efforts of various governments I’m proud of the fact that my parent’s generation fought hard for social justice whilst refusing to conform to the stereotypes of those who would denegrate them as a feral, ignorant underclass.

Which generation was that? How old are you??

I'm assuming you live in some tied cottage, 2 up 2 down, and only eat raw gravel (on a Sunday, and then only if you're lucky), as would befit a 'proper working class' person. Because anything else would be frightfully bourgeois, non? 😉

But I don’t bang on about ‘working class pride’

Irony overload....

I'm not sure you fully understand the concept of 'irony', my friend...

My parents were born in 1916 and 1932.

Nobody aspires to be ‘working class’

I never said they did.

.....wearing it as a badge of honour is merely marking your position in the social stratification as created by the ruling classes....

I disagree, for the reasons outlined in my previous post.

I don't 'wear it as a badge of pride' but I AM proud of them and their generation for what they fought for, how they conducted themselves and for what they believed in.

...bridges argues...

...nickc feels left out...

I don’t ‘wear it as a badge of pride’

Now, where's that irony meter...

As I said in a previous post, I'm not being judgemental about the fact that people have cleaners!

I'm merely stating the fact that I prefer not to have one and why.

I’m assuming you live in some tied cottage, 2 up 2 down, and only eat raw gravel (on a Sunday, and then only if you’re lucky), as would befit a ‘proper working class’ person. Because anything else would be frightfully bourgeois, non? 😉

You are free to assume what you like.

I've not classified myself as anything.
I have referred to my background and that of my parents and their generation.

I’ve not classified myself as anything.

Irony meter? Anyone seen it? 😀

Enough already. So you don't feel you need a cleaner. No need whatsoever to bring class into it though, was there? No.

Jesus wept....

Remind me never, ever to discuss anything with you, ever again.

It's ok; I'll let you have the last word, if it makes you feel any better.

Oh, bugger...

Now, where’s that irony meter…

You can pay someone to do ironying as well if you want

But what if I've got too much working class pride?