Splurging for Sanity
I don’t have much experience with having a cleaning service. About 10 years ago, when I was single, lived alone and regularly worked about 50 hours a week I hired an aquaintance who was using housecleaning to make ends meet after quitting her corporate job. This arrangement worked out great for both of us and lasted about 9 months until she moved on to other employment.
Finances have felt too lean to hire someone to help clean since we purchased our home. And it always seemed silly to spend money on something that LaLa and I could do ourselves. After all our house is only about 1200 sq ft! But now that the debt is paid off, and our emergency fund is in place…we decided to investigate options for domestic harmony.
I remember earlier this year when Nina decided the cost was worth it, and for now we too have decided to spend $140 a month on cleaning (a visit every other week). I think we’ll be able to keep things tidy in between visits but knowing someone else will take care of the deeper cleaning is freeing us up to work on home repairs and projects and preventing us from expecting each other to do the cleaning we both abhor.
Sometimes you just need to hire the experts to come in and take care of certain jobs. For us, I think the decision to hire some cleaning help feels like a very valuable way to spend part of our monthly budget. Of course, I’m also very aware that not everyone has the luxury of making this type of choice and I do feel grateful that our financial situation allows us to experiment with this.
So far, it’s worth it…time will tell…
Ooh, enjoy that!
Interesting timing for this post. For the last 9 months we have used a cleaning service & decided it didn’t really give us what we hoped. For instance, they “penalize” you for having them out only once a month ($120) and their 2X a month was too much $. So we found while we liked the “clean” week we were cleaning as much as before and spending extra cash. I researched an organic cleaner I really wanted to use, but we are outside their travel radius.
So we’re back at the drawing board — cancel this one because we’re not getting what we hoped from it (just light cleaning on the inbetween weeks) and save the $? OR, back to the drawing board with someone else ….. a conundrum I had hoped was solved…..
How did you go about choosing your cleaning service?
We find nearly every service or tradesperson through our friends. In our case we had one couple who had been using this one service for a few years and had already referred them to another couple who were also quite happy with them.
When we initially called them we asked what types of cleaning products they used. Luckily they were VERY open to using our products (fewer chemicals) where we preferred it.
This is definitely not a large commercial outfit, but a legitimate sole proprietor that hires a single assistance. I think in our case the smallness/flexibility made it a good match for us.
Good luck with your search!