To think £90 a week is insane for a cleaner

[whyohwhy25]

Just had a quote for a weekly clean from a cleaner who had previously done a deep clean on my house. £90 a week!

To be fair my house is odd and has some extra rooms as the previous owners extended it a lot (5 bedrooms (1 with en suite), 1 bathroom, 1 shower room, 2 lounges, kitchen/diner, home office and playroom.). It’s not a mansion though! It’s just a semi.

This cleaner has a PA and her own company, I think she must be pretty high end, I mean she must be charging a bit extra to cover the PA? Surely that’s too much?

I look after a five bedroom five bathroom villa in the Algarve and my cleaner (who works like lightening) spent 9 hours doing a full clean of the house. I am hoping that now the big clean is done, the other cleans will be shorter, but it simply takes time to do five bedrooms. And this is not doing the laundry - that is separate. She does a three bed two bath villa in four hours as standard.

She probably uses a virtual PA service a few hours per week to do her admin - that's having a PA but might only cost her £25 per week!

If she's been asked to clean a 13 room 3 bathroom house thoroughly every week it will take £90 worth of time. What's she quoting for exactly. If you were a cleaner yourself you'll know you need to specify whether she's moving furniture to vacuum, cleaning the insides of windows and the oven and even cupboards, or whether she's just doing the kitchen and main bathroom thoroughly and vacuuming around furniture throughout but not dusting everywhere, moving anything, doing windows or the oven or inside the fridge.

What cleaners do varies so hugely, it's strange that if you used to be a cleaner you don't know how many hours she's quoting for.

Doesn’t matter that it is a semi not a mansion . It is the amount of rooms you want doing each week and you have a lot of rooms.
Have you specified what you want done each week or has she just worked it out by the rooms.
I don’t think £90 is unreasonable if you expect each room to be done.

I don’t know how many hours as I told her I was interested in a weekly clean, she said she’s get back to me if she had availability. I then got an email from her PA saying she did have availability on Thursdays at 10am. I replied asking for the cost, and I received a quote just saying £90 a week. No mention of hours in response to my initial enquiry.

Basically would expect to pay £12-£15 an hour. At 7 hours say (that’s 10-6 with an hour for lunch) that’s £84-£105 so I suppose in the right ball park.

But I need to check if she will be doing 7 hours. Any less, and she does seem expensive.

Will wait for clarification...

I don’t even want every room doing. She has a direct debit scheme it seems, and she works out the price based on number of rooms, if you have a pet (I do but it’s not vert mess making really), like a menu of services, but no option to vary frequency.

Just ask her for the hourly rate and tell her either how many hours you want and what you expect done, or tell her what you expect done and ask how many hours that would take.

You probably don’t really need every room done every week? So either ask for fortnightly visits, or ask her to do half the rooms each week. For a while our cleaner did downstairs one week, upstairs the next.

OP , how long do you think it should take to clean your house and how much were you expecting the quote to be ?

I am self employed as a cleaner. I would say 90 is fine. One of my clients pays 120 per week.

The pet might be partly because of different vacuums if your cleaner brings her own. Mine does and she has one she uses in pet free homes and one she uses in homes with animals.

She won't be charging £30 an hour. You couldn't clean a house that size from top to bottom in 3 hours.

Actually thinking about it as she works in a team it might be 2, so say £15 an hour for each in 3 hours.
Another cleaning service I’ve just looked at (which people complain about being expensive) charge £15 per hour per cleaner. So it’s probably in the right ball park. I’m just very out of the loop of how much things cost!
And to be fair it does take ages to clean the damn house. Which is why I was never on top of it and why I needed a deep clean when I suddenly had a load of people descend a few weeks ago.
DH seems surprisingly unfazed, but thinks we should go for fortnightly.

My Dsil cleans for a couple of naice ladies and she charges £12ph.

Op do you use all of the rooms all of the time? if not, why not keep those doors closed and thus the rooms clean and just get the cleaner to do your kitchen and bathrooms and perhaps dust and vacuum the daily use rooms.

I used to pay £15p/h in the South East and it took 2 hours to properly clean my one bed flat, admittedly it was a big one bed but still. So for your house £90 seems about right to me.

It's really challenging to find a good reliable cleaner. We recently had someone come in to do a deeper clean and she brought her sister with her. So I paid both of them €12.50 an hour when I thought it was only €12.50 per hour and they stayed for 5 hours. The following week they came back and did another four hours (another €100). My house was 2,5 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, 1 kitchen, lounge/dining room.

The house was spotless but they told me they can do the whole house for 5 hours a week from now on, which is €125 a week. Yes, the standard of their work was really high but I don't have €6000 a year to spend on domestic help and can't afford it to look like a hotel if that is the price. It annoys me when they bring another person which doubles the initial quote, they should be honest up front.

When I said I was only interested in a cleaner bi-weekly they cancelled twice and I now won't bother again.

I have two cleaners and pay £12.50 per hour for two hours twice a week. Total bill is £100. They bring everything with them in terms of equipment and are happy to do extras like making beds or swapping laundry if they see it needs doing.
We probably don’t need quite so much now the children are here less frequently but it does mean I don’t have to worry if we’ve people coming as they are happy to swap days and do Friday morning then Monday.

I pay £15/hour plus transport (since we moved). It seems like a fair wage for someone who works hard, you can find someone who'll work for a lower amount easily enough, but:

1. will they be as good, rotating all the deep cleaning without being asked
2. can you trust them
3. is it fair to pay someone a low wage because cleaning is manual work, even if they're highly skilled?

If she pays the PA £15/hour to do all the admin and cleans in that time then she's just giving someone a role that she finds more difficult, that seems sensible to me.

Our house is a little smaller by 2 rooms and takes 3.5 to 6 hours per week including washing the bedding and doing the ironing. The biggest variable is mess (DH sanding skirtings etc!) and then the laundry; if I haven't got to it then she washes all the clothes and sheets, dries stuff on the heated airers before ironing what she can, sometimes there's been 4 loads (she leaves the last load of towels or sheets for us to hang if everything else is done). If your quote doesn't include laundry then it seems a bit high. You could also ask her for a simple hourly rate and stress that you want some deep cleaning on a monthly rotation, then she might drop the costs and make your decision easier.

My parents house is similar size. With an additional bathroom. They pay £48 for 4 hours (and agreed to pay 3 weeks hol a year). Parents buy all cleaning materials. She doesn't do the study or 2 of the guest room every week, she swaps it each week as they don't get used much so they don't feel it needs doing weekly.
That's London suburbs.
I think £90 is a lot!

We tried fortnightly, but the deep clean needs doing for more hours then, we have to vacuum and mop more, we felt sad not having sparkly bathrooms and everyone ran out of nicely ironed clothes. I worked out it only ended up costing £15 less, so we begged for weekly again.

At least it does seem reasonable, as she was really good, and very professional and businesslike. And I feel a bit better about my failed attempts to TOMM/Hinch my house, I tried and tried and tried and I could never get on top of everything, and it all just fell apart when life got in any way busy. I’ve got to admit that I do need help, and for decent help I’ll have to pay a decent amount.

I pay £40 for 2.5 hours in London for 6 room house, and also pay holiday pay (although no formal agreement about this - I just think this is the right thing to do, so pay for 52 weeks a year when she usually works about 46). Have had the same cleaner for 5 years. My mum taught me that a good cleaner was worth their weight in gold and I can completely trust her.

I have a cleaner and we pay £45 for 3 hrs. I get mine cleaned fortnightly. We are fairly tidy people and I do hoover in between as I have dogs. 4 beds, 2 baths, sitting room, dining room and kitchen.
£90 for the size of your house sounds about right.

Do you need to use all the rooms though??

You are paying more for rooms that you probably don't actually need. Why not shut some of them up, and ask for a quote for the rooms you regularly use only. The unused rooms could have a hoover and dust every so often, either by you or you could intermittently book extra time.

It also depends on the size of the rooms.

If you multiplied what we pay our cleaner by your number of rooms, it would be around £90. I agree that would be a lot to spend on cleaning, but that is a lot of rooms to clean!

I am in the north west and had a quote from a cleaning company for £75 per week. I have a three bedroom two bathroom semi. The rooms are large but minimalist - not lots to clean! When I almost fainted asked how many hours that was for, she refused to tell me... "we don't quote by the hour, we quote for the job however long it takes".
I've since found a one-woman band who does two hours a week for £25.