Who hires a cleaner? What do they do for you?

[ziopin]

I'm thinking of getting a cleaner for a few hours per week

What specific cleaning tasks do you expect your cleaner to do?

Message withdrawn

I knew somebody would say that C'mon specific I said!

4 hours per week - clean, dust and hoover the entire house

Mine sort of gets on with it, does her own thing, but will also do specific things if I ask her.

She comes twice a week, one 3 hour session and one 4 hour session and:

cleans the kitchen and kitchen floor(oven/hob/sink/worksurfaces - cupboards if I ask her)
hoovers everywhere
cleans the bathrooms (2), especially the tiles (she has a thing about limescale and wages war with any black spots that dare show themselves on the grouting!)
dusts
does all the ironing

On top of that she will also water my plants and if I have any cut flowers (not a regular thing) she will rearrange those and top up the water

She is lovely. She also spends a fair time talking to my cats!

I was thinking of asking her to clean the loos, dust and hoover on the one day, and then more specific task like clean the oven or strip the beds the next time. What do you think?

Sounds fair enough - nothing unreasonable about any of those tasks.

Oh ironing too, that sounds lovely! Maybe I could give her a couple of extra hours!

Might be worth having a chat with prospective cleaner first about what he/she thinks is doable for the number of hours you want - no point him/her doing a rush job so that nothing gets done properly.

(Note PC post, btw )

We have ours for 4/5 hours each week. She cleans the kitchen, cooker (not oven, DP loves that job... honest), living room, hall, stairs landing, bedrooms (2), bathroom, study. We have 4 blinds upstairs and she cleans them every other week. She changes bed linen whenever we put the linen out. Vaccums everywhere and dusts all the skirting and door frames.

She doesnt tidy which I think is a good thing... we'd never find anything otherwise!

She also sorts out our wastepaper bins upstairs - one lot for binning and the other loot for recycling.

I dont work at the moment so all my clothes are iron free... DP irons 5 shirts for himself every Sunday night.

She's great.

We have one who comes in for three hours a week and hoovers all carpets, cleans bathroom and downstairs loo, mops the hall and kitchen floor, polishes the bedrooms/ lounge, cleans kitchen, irons if there is anything I leave on the ironing board, changes bedding if sheets left for her and does the internal windows when she feels they need doing. And writing all that down has just made me realise how much she does in three hours and so I feel for moaning to DP that the skirts and door frames were grubby and that she is slacking. God I need a slap!

We have a list for our cleaner of jobs to do and she ticks this of as she goes along.

We created this because our previous cleaner didn't seem to do a lot in the 3 hours we paid her for, this way expectations are set.

Our new cleaner is FAB ! Personally I'd ask for ask much as you can but let her know what is important to do first and then other stuff if she gets time.

You all must have huge houses. Ours is 2 hours a week and cleans the bathroom & kitchen, hoovers & dusts the whole house, bit of tidying, and gives one room each week a real going over.