My wife and I have gone through at least a dozen house-keepers/cleaners over the past 18 or so years. We pay our current housekeeper $130 for each visit, and schedule her for 2 to 3 times per month, depending on the month. During the Fall/Winter months we schedule her more often than the Spring/Summer months. We have paid as much as $185 per visit, but that was for a short 3-month stint that began in October of one year, and only because we were in a bind and somewhat desperate.
Our housekeeper arrives at 7:30 every other Saturday morning and takes between 4 and 5 hours to clean. Our house is a 2-story colonial and approximately 3600 sq/ft. She dusts all the surfaces and vacuums the floors in all the bedrooms, living room, family room, dining room, and foyer. She also changes the bed linen in our bedroom, and loads and starts the washer in the laundry room if there are clothes to be washed, and transfers anything already in the washer to the dryer. She also organizes the closet in the laundry room as that is where all her cleaning supplies, buckets, and cloths are kept, and lets my wife know whenever items are running low. She spends most of her time cleaning the 3 bathrooms, breakfast room, and kitchen. In the kitchen, in addition to washing down and disinfecting all the surfaces, she removes, cleans, and replaces everything in the refrigerator, and fills and starts the dishwasher if there is anything in the sink or on the stove.
My wife is very picky and prefers the housekeeper not to bring or use her own supplies or equipment. We have a central vac so the housekeeper just has to take the hose around to plug into the receptacles in each room instead of lugging a bulky vacuum cleaner around the house and up and down stairs.
We don’t have any children so the house doesn’t really become really dirty during the period between her visits but it is a good-sized house so cleaning takes a while.
My wife and I used to have what I consider to be a ridiculous habit of cleaning, or at least tidying up, before the housekeeper arrived. We are typically out of the house during the day and there is never too much out of place anyway so I put a stop to that nonsense. If the housekeeper does pick up something and doesn’t know where it should be placed, she typically places it on the table in the breakfast room, which is the most conspicuous and centrally located area of the house.
When the housekeeper is done, the house looks and smells amazing, and everything seems brighter. It’s a noticeable difference. On the way out my wife will hand her a check and confirm the date of her next visit. If my wife doesn’t confirm a date with her that typically means the housekeeper did something pretty egregious that my wife did not like, which also typically means a search for a replacement.
We have had issues with housekeepers who have broken things. That things get broken from time to time is expected. What causes us not to have someone back again if she breaks something and doesn’t tell us about it and we find out after she leaves, sometimes days later. I don’t understand the logic here. Do they think if they don’t tell us we won’t notice or won’t know it was they who broke it?
We have had one issue with theft that we know of, and that was only because a representative of the agency she worked for questioned her about a personalized item in her possession and then called us to check. Had the rep not done so we probably would never have known the item was taken. Needless to say we didn’t have the housekeeper back, and don’t know if the agency disciplined or fired her.
In our experience, the independent cleaners who work for themselves, instead of one of the mid-sized agencies such as Merry Maids, are more reliable, more flexible, do a better job, and are more honest. We have routinely had housekeepers place money (typically change) they’ve found during the course of their cleaning on our table in the breakfast room for us to find.