In the before days, if the cleaning lady hasn’t arrived before my husband left for work, we’d leave the door unlocked so she could get in. She licked it when she left. Now we both work from home, so the issue is mostly keeping out of her way.
I am going to hire someone else. Not much more money and there will be two cleaners who can be subbed in for if anyone needs it. Less time than one cleaner, esp one who cancels all the time and is late. I now know the questions to ask going in. Much better situation.
There is a balance between complaining at each time something doesn’t seem right and giving it some time, esp when you never had another cleaning service. I didn’t know what the standard was. But if the reason it kept happening was that I didn’t complain each and every time then good riddance to them.
Whatever company I use always has a key to my house: until the pandemic, I was never home when someone would come to clean. I didn’t cancel because I wasn’t going to be there, I cancelled because I wasn’t going to be able to remove my dog from the house (normally I would have taken her to doggy daycare on cleaning day).
I never leave my door unlocked, even when I’m home. 
Same, but I actually just leave a door unlocked. I live in a very low crime area and I have a security system, when they come through the door it sets off the 60s timer for them to deactivate the alarm with a punch code (which I supply to the agency and I guess they keep on file); they have standing instructions to lock the door when they leave, which they have never failed to do. The security system stays disarmed though, which is fine–I am not super paranoid about home security.
While I would obviously not just tacitly allow it, I don’t worry too much about a cleaner stealing while unsupervised in my home. I don’t have a lot of sentimental items, expensive or etc items (guns and some watches) that would be prized by a thief are kept in a heavy locked safe, and I don’t keep any real loose cash of valuables laying around. Most of the expensive stuff in my house that isn’t locked up is too big to easily move.
I will say though, a good friend of mine got married about 7 years ago and bought his wife a ~$40,000 engagement ring. The wife is an attorney who does a lot of work with indigent defendants, and a woman she met through some of her outreach along those lines ended up becoming their cleaning lady. She had cleaned for them for a few years, but one day the ring disappeared after one of her visits. She also went dark on them and wouldn’t answer phone calls for a couple of weeks. They searched around local pawn shops and monitored eBay to see if the ring went up for sale, but no luck. They actually just ate the loss entirely, even though it was insured–the wife didn’t want to file a police report on the cleaning lady and insurance wouldn’t cover the loss without one.
We once had a cleaner (the daughter of our babysitter) steal some stuff. She was young, and she stole stuff attractive to kids, not stuff of any real value. But damn, that was awkward.
Or current cleaner doesn’t steal. I’ve left cash on my bedside table, and we have lots of small items (like silverware made of actual silver) in unlocked drawers, and nothing has ever been missing after a visit, except one time when she brought a friend and the friend threw away some things we wanted, that the friend thought were trash, i assume. (I know she threw them away, because i found them in the garbage bag she left in our garage trash bin.)
But that’s one of the reasons i like to hire a particular person, and not an agency.
Congrats on your decision. That sounds like a good plan. Your current cleaner is obviously a bad fit for you. No reason to pay someone to aggravate you. I hope your next cleaner is great.
I used to clean offices. The trainers were very explicit that we were never to assume that something was trash. Only whatever was actually in the trash can got thrown away, unless there was a note on something too big to fit in the trash can.
Yeah, in an office where you never speak to the people whose space you clean, and they can’t rummage through the trash bag, that’s incredibly important.
But that was nothing. We briefly hired a cleaner who used to throw away our loose change. And parts of children’s toys that were in her way. (One of the colored nesting/stacking cups, for instance.) Yeah, we’re slobs, but i want you to remove dirt, not misplaced objects.
It may have been a passive-aggressive way of indicating she didn’t want to work for us.
Our wonderful reliable efficient honest cleaner aged out 6 years ago. Since then, my sister has been staying with us on and off and has helped out with cleaning. I’ve been thinking of hiring someone new, but this thread is showing me how complicated it is to find the right someone.