Cleaner - what does yours get done in 2 hours?

[Charlotteandwilbur]

Not sure if my expectations are wildly over optimistic here. We’ve recently started with a cleaner for 2 hours per week. She did say at the start 2 hours wasn’t enough for a full clean for a house this size so I said that’s fine just do what you can in 2 hours focusing on the floors and bathrooms.

House is a large detached. Rooms are living room, play room, kitchen - diner, hall, downstairs toilet, 4 bedrooms, one bathroom upstairs and an en-suite.

Yesterday she did:
hoover all carpets
mopped tiles floor in kitchen - diner through to hall.
basic bathroom clean in all bathrooms/toilet but just a quick wipe I think. Shower cubicles not cleaned and hard to tell whether toilets had actually been cleaned.

she didn’t do:
kitchen at all - hob and surfaces not touched
dusted any surface

I suppose my question is how small does a house have to be to have a full clean in 2 hours? I feel like I need a plan going forwards. Should I shut certain rooms off and say ignore those rooms and do a full clean of the rest? Or upstairs one week downstairs one week?? What she is actually getting done seems a bit pointless as I’m then having to go round and do the bits she hasn’t done.

But I might be being an bit unreasonable expecting more than what she’s done. I’m at work when she’s here.

Cant pay for anymore than 2 hours as she charges £20 per hour (normal north west town) and I think anymore is just too much.

Anyone have any solutions that have worked for them?

I'm always surprised at how long our cleaner takes but for reference, we have a three bed house with three bathrooms and our cleaner is here between four and five hours. We had a cleaner for two hours a week when we lived in a small 2 bed flat with one bathroom and a tiny kitchen.

Ahh right so maybe I am massively underestimating how long stuff takes. I only do the cleaning in bits here and there so never thought about how many hours it might add up to 🤔

I think you need at least 4 hours for a house that size. You need to decide on what are your priorities. I personally would get a robot hoover to put on every day and get your cleaner to do bathrooms and kitchen and then a quick dust if she has time.

Have you tried cleaning your own house in two hours and seeing how much you get done? We’ve recently started a fortnightly cleaner (2 hours every two weeks) and she can’t do a deep clean of everything in that time but everything’s wiped around, vacuumed, mopped. So it all looks clean. We have 4 bedrooms (but one is a box room used as a study), bathroom, en-suite, WC, lounge and kitchen/diner. House is about 125sqm so fairly big but not unusually so.

One week she focused on thoroughly cleaning the glass shower screens; another week the skirting boards. I clean more thoroughly than she does but it takes me longer than two hours to do the whole house. I rarely have uninterrupted time to do it all in one go like she can.

I’m quite happy to accept the extra help and be realistic about what one person can do in a two hour slot. I tend to do a deeper clean of e.g. the shower the week she doesn’t come and then it’s easy enough for her to keep on top of it the other week. We tried having a weekly cleaner last year but it didn’t suit as I felt I was still deep cleaning around them as they just did a quick surface level clean. Fortnightly is better for me, as it’s actually less work for me than weekly (as strange as that might sound).

4 hours every other week would probably be a better use of money and time

I live in a four bed house.

In two hours the cleaner:

Cleans the kitchen
Cleans the bathroom
Cleans the upstairs loo
Dusts all of downstairs (kitchen, bathroom, front room, dining room, hallway)
Hoovers and mops all of downstairs
Wipes the stairs down

Then with time remaining she does odd jobs like wipe woodwork down, clean the inside of the windows etc. I always say not to do the bedrooms. We have floorboards which I deal with and it only needs a light dust maybe one a month. I probably clean the floors about that often too.