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From here,
"+1 for paying someone else to clean your house"
I'm curious, what's the going rate for such a service and how many hours a week do folk have in employ?
For context, I've recently moved into a much larger house with my girlfriend and inherited a couple of 20-something slobs in the process. Even having someone pop round occasionally to shove a hoover about or wash down a bathroom would be a massive help.
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.