Cleaner for uni house

[scattysue]

DS has been sharing a house with 7 other boys (he is a 2nd year at uni). All good other than the kitchen is always a tip and really gets him down - no one sticks to rota, washing up sits there for days, bins are unemptiwd. He will be sharing again with these lads next year as they all get on like a house on fire! But I know how DS hates the mess and it will be his final year so I would like to ease his way. I would be happy to get a cleaner to come in to the house for 2 hours a week (£17 an hour) and, of course, I would not expect his housemates to contribute. Will this be well-received if I frame it as a gift?

Snowplough parenting.

Let him sort out his own problems.

I think that they will be even messier if a cleaner is going to sort stuff like that. They are adult men so should be cleaning themselves.

My son had a similar problem. He dealt with it by calling a house meeting, and presenting the others with costings for a weekly cleaner to do the common spaces (not their bedrooms). I seem to recall he broke it down into each person contributing the equivalent of one and a half coffees or such like in order to live in a clean house. They all agreed, and life went on.

In halls at uni all my kids(4) had to have everything relatively tidy on say a Tuesday as a cleaner can into the kitchen and did surfaces,sink, cooker and floor. My youngest sons accomodationkept getting thank you note from the cleaning staff💕When they were living with friends my daughters are like me andMADE others clean up and younger son piled up other ppl messy stuff in a corner and cleaned. Age old problem 🙄

I just don’t think about the squalor my dd is living in at university. My university house was nowhere near as bad as DD’s is. We had a rota. Like you, my dd decided to live with the same people again so that’s how it is. And actually I wouldn’t like it at all if one of the other parents got a cleaner in. I’d quite like my adult dd to grow up a bit while she’s at university.

If it's that messy, the cleaner might not be able to clean tbh. The cleaners in DD's halls refused to clean the kitchen because it was so rank.

(I always tidy up for my cleaners, so I can't imagine greeting them with 6 days of washing up and overflowing bins. Gross!)

Suggest the idea to him. But not that you'll fund it. See if he likes rhe idea enough to speak to his roommates about it.

Alternatively if its poatly wahsing up thats an issue. Couls they not get a dishwasher?

I think negotiating this stuff and tolerating squalor are both part of the living away experience 🤷

I was thinking about this again today - and imagining what a difficult position a parent would put their child in if they did this. Whenever anything needed a joint decision in the house the other housemates would be waiting for the one whose parent had paid to start throwing their weight about … And the housemates would never feel they could relax and make a mess (and why shouldn’t they?) for fear of the cleaner telling on them to the over-invested parent. And the parent arriving in a bate to shout at them about the state of the shared house …

It would be awful.

TBF OP updated on this a while back and said she wouldn't.

It's really common in the larger sororities/fraternities to have cooks and cleaning staff. Given how much they socialise and the value of these homes it really isn't surprising.

Yes, I know, @Gymly - but that doesn’t stop me thinking about how such a situation would pan out …

I was in a mixed house of 7 and we all.lived in squalor fairly "happily". Every few weeks 1 or 2 people would crack and clean the whole kitchen (or more rarely a bathroom), we'd sort of take in unofficial turns. In between the big clean ups the kitchen would become filled with dirty dishes, and there would be mould in the oldest ones. We survived and I'm sure we all turned out OK in the end.