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am I the only person without cleaning help?
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Anonymous
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This is 16:35 -- the one who thinks not having a cleaning person/service is ridiculous. I cleaned houses -- not my mother, not my husband's grandmother -- me. It was my job in high school and it was an awesome job. I loved it and I grew up here in NoVA in a very affluent community. I have had several cleaning services over the years and have been using the same lady for about 5 years now. She has a nicer car than I do and her daughter works with her when she is home from college. Her husband works with her when she is short handed.
I should have been more specific with my statement. I have several friends who don't employ a cleaning person/service, work FT, husbands do NOTHING, and they complain about cleaning chores. I think they are ridiculous. If you are married and there are tasks that need to be done, either you split them up and do them yourselves, or you hire someone else to do them. If you are doing your part and your spouse is not doing theirs, then either have the fight, get help, or live with the inequity. I think it is ridiculous to complain instead of helping yourself. |
Anonymous
| We both work FT and don't have a cleaner but we are thinking about having someone come twice a month. |
Anonymous
If you have to persuade him then it is obvious that you do not have an equal relationship. The man is the head of the household philosophy. |
Anonymous
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We didn't the first few years but we hired a service to come bi-weekly about 2 months before I had our first child. I am SO glad we did. I work full time, DH works full time, we don't even have a long commute but who wants to come home and scrub toilets on the weekend when they could be spending time with their DH and child?
DH did little to no cleaning and we did not share bathrooms. Mine wasn't bad, his was horrifying. I agree with PPs about a cleaning service being cheaper than divorce. Now if your DH is the neat freak in the house and doesn't mind doing the work, you go right ahead. The fact that I live in a townhome with 4 bathrooms and 2 filghts of stairs, it's worth the money alone that they take care of those things let alone all the cobwebbies and baseboards, windowsills, etc. It's those things that you don't do often that they do regularly. Oh - and less cleaning means more time for lovin'. In Fairfax I pay $75 and the price hasn't increased in 3 yrs. The company I use (small company) also instituted some QC in the last year that has made a big difference. They even cleaned the crumbs out of my toaster oven on Friday! |
Anonymous
| Yes, two FT working parents. And as far as the "class" thing goes, I bet poor brown people built the house you live in, paved the roads you drive on, sewed the clothing you are wearing, stocked the shelves with the food you bought, scrubbed the hospital sheets when you had your baby, and washed the dishes in the back of every restaurant you've ever eaten it. And they are happy to have the jobs if they are getting paid a fair wage and treated with dignity. I pay my cleaning lady well, and since I don't have any weird hangups, when I see her we have nice chats about our kids and movies and she recently told me she is happy to be able to afford to send her kids to Catholic school. I treat her as a professional self-employed businesswoman, because that is what she is. |
Anonymous
decisions are joint. so to come to a joint decision, one has to persuade the other who holds a differing view. how is her making a unilateral decision any better? dumb comment. |
Anonymous
| We don't - rather put the money in my son's college fund. |
Anonymous
I completely agree. I find the whole class discussion incredibly condescending, with no recognition that cleaning house is an honest way to earn money vs. thinking it is just so beneath anyone they can't possibly pay someone to do it. The two women who clean our house clean several houses in my neighborhood, and have for years. When we were doing a renovation and didn't need them because the house was going to be a mess no matter what, they called during the end to ask me when we'd be needing them again. They noticed they didn't have my house to clean - it's how they makes her living. These women co-own and run their own business which is a hell of a lot more than I could manage. |
Anonymous
I am a PP who stated that I have class/race issues with this. I'm one of those "brown people" you mentioned and I stand by my assertion that I have a problem with it. I'm not saying that hiring cleaning services should be outlawed; the OP asked if she was the only person without help and I answered her question. Sorry that made you both feel defensive. |
Anonymous
| It's not being defensive. It's rolling my eyes to people on this board constantly trying to out-liberal each other. |
Anonymous
| Well, the funny thing is, I'm not a particularly liberal person. As a brown person, I do think the whole notion of white liberal guilt is overplayed and that white people definitely can try to out-liberal each other, though that's a different topic completely. I just happen to have an issue with hiring cleaning service but like I said, each to their own. |
Anonymous
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Most of my friends got a weekly maid once they got married; it was easier than fighting over who does the cleaning, apparently. And most of my guy friends have someone come in weekly. (most of my single friends clean their own places.) I don't have help - I'm a single mom, and the money just isn't there. But if I got married (and had 2 incomes for one household), I'd be on board with a cleaning service in a second.
My house is usually reasonably neat, but things like mopping the floors and cleaning the tub only get done when I think, "hey, the floor needs mopping", not on some kind of schedule. I'm probably selling my house this spring and I'm already dreading how to keep the house clean with a full-time job, a long commute and a 2-year-old. |
Anonymous
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We don't have cleaning help, but we're in the minority for sure, even among our friends who are all NGO/academic "low earners" like ourselves. We both work full time, and we have one kid + pets. (Would love to ease the cleaning burden by getting rid of the cat, but it's our responsibility blah blah.)
Anyhoo, I don't find cleaning to be that much of a drain. I do it as I go, never spending more than 5-10 minutes at a time on it, and my house looks fine. Could it be cleaner? Probably. But we're not so wealthy that we can easily drop that kind of money on something I can do myself. You know what I WOULD pay for, if it were in the same price range? Kid chauffeur. Dropoff and pickup each day eats up WAY more of my time that I need for something else. Like getting to work on time. |
Anonymous
Does your house get messy if you work FT?? If nobody is home the majority of the day, do you really have a crumb filled kitchen, dirty bathrooms, etc THAT much to justify the expense of a cleaning service? I can maybe understand a SAHM having a messy house being home 24/7, but if you are working and the kids are in school/daycare? |
Anonymous
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We do not have cleaning help. We mow our own yard. We do tend to hire people to do the big yard clean-ups now (once in the Fall and once in the Spring).
My husband is full-time and I work 80 percent. But I don't see it changing once I go to full-time (could be famous last words). The biggest problem we have with a cleaning service (other than the price) is that it would terrify our dog. And really - our biggest obstacle is clutter. If we keep on top of the clutter, cleaning doesn't take that long. My plan is once I got full-time is to hopefully work one day from home - so I can at least throw in some laundry and do some quick cleaning during my "lunch." Again, could be famous last words. Question to the OP. If you both work from home, wouldn't a cleaning crew be distracting? I always imagined that the benefit was that they did the work while you weren't there. |