Singles and DINKs - Housecleaners
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Anonymous
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Is this common? I work with several folks in their 20s and 30s, and several of the single folk and DINKs have weekly or bi-weekly cleaners.
We are not a hard charging office, we are a sleepy government contractor (thing Booz or CACI), so it’s not like a big law partner where we work long hours, travel, and make the big bucks with no bandwidth to clean and time is extremely valuable. Is this a generational thing? I’m GenX and we never had cleaners until my spouses promotion started requiring much longer hours and our 3rd kid started making his own messes! The kids do laundry and help with daily chores; the cleaners are doing the base level deep clean that would eat up our weekend. Even then it feels indulgent! |
Anonymous
| I only know of singles where there's a roommate situation and everyone chips in the cost as a condition of rooming together. Otherwise you always have that one freeriding slob. |
Anonymous
| I changed jobs, got a significant pay increase, and got a house cleaner this year. It was so much less expensive than expected. I regret not having looked into it earlier. |
Anonymous
| This is very normal. We have a kid now but have had biweekly cleaners ever since we moved into a house with multiple bedrooms and bathrooms, which was way before baby. Most of my friends have cleaners too. - age 32 |
Anonymous
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I think it's far weirder to be worried about this than it is for anyone to hire a housecleaner.
Why are you sweating this? Are they not coming to work? Are they doing something bad? People do a lot of stuff! It's okay if everyone is not in lockstep. You have to calm down. |
Anonymous
That is surprising, I guess I'm out of the loop or just old! Did you all grow up UMC with cleaners? I grew up MC and of course am of the Reality Bites generation, so I wonder if its a socioeconomic cohort or a generational trend... |
Anonymous
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We're DINKs.
DH works long hours and I'm part time. I can't wrap my head around paying for cleaners, so we don't. But I do feel like keeping up as much as I would like is hard. We tend to clean together on weekends for bigger projects, like windows or floors. DH is not one to expect me to clean because I'm the woman or because I now work less hours than he does (bless him, lol), so if he sees something and thinks it should be cleaned, he'll usually just do it. He does the dishes as I hate doing them, and he often folds my laundry. There is stuff he doesn't want to do or doesn't see, so I always do it. And often if he sees me cleaning he'll stop what he's doing and clean, and vice versa. I hire cleaners for a deep clean maybe once a year, but given how much that costs I should just get them monthly. But it's really hard for me to pay for it -- and it's not a financial thing, it's a mental thing that I don't understand. It's just some vestigial value from who knows where that I "should" clean my own house (also somewhere in there is that it should be sparkling, or at least cleaner than it is, but that is a separate issue). |
Anonymous
OP does not need to "calm down." This is a perfectly reasonable post. |
Anonymous
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I think people who grew up with this regard it as normal.
I worked in an odd position (research lab) where we were earning poverty wages but most of my colleagues came from very wealthy backgrounds. In our 20s those people all had cleaners taking care of their apartments while we worked long hours. I remember lamenting that I wasted half the weekend catching up on laundry and cleaning and they looked at me like I had two heads. |
Anonymous
Having a cleaner to do my laundry is next level! I mean, between the vacuuming, the bathrooms and kitchens, I would guess that's 6-8 hours a week of work? |
Anonymous
| When DH and I were 20-something DINKS we outsourced cleaning. He had typical bachelor habits at the time (and also was in the beginning of his medical residency) and I resented being the one cleaning the bathrooms each week, vacuuming, dusting, etc. I did not work as much, but I still worked FT and had a 45 minute commute each way. When I proposed splitting the cleaning, he proposed a bi-weekly house cleaner, and that worked out great! |
Anonymous
| My husband and I are DINKS (but just found out we are expecting…fingers crossed!) and got a monthly service when we moved from a condo to a house. He has a demanding job (10-12 hours a day, with no ability to work remotely); I work from home but also have a demanding job. Neither of us are ‘dirty’, but he is messy and similar to some posters above I was getting resentful about doing 90% of the cleaning. Monthly is perfect for us, makes it easy for us to maintain a clean house the rest of the month, and forces us (mainly him) to straighten up prior to the cleaners. If I ultimately become a SAHM we will no longer do this but right now it is a no brainer. |
Anonymous
big jobs and big money it’s expected; I’m talking about way more MC 9-5 roles. |
Anonymous
I wouldn’t necessarily consider us big money for this area; we make around $330K combined. |
Anonymous
The people I am working with make about $80k. |