This post is a chapter of the book It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself: Housekeeping In Spite Of It All) by Hanne Blank Boyd.
Click here for the full table of contents.
Hiring someone to help you with your living spaces requires you to perform four basic processes: assess your needs, research your options, get some estimates, and choose a provider.
Assessing your needs is the first step. Let’s say you know you want to hire someone to deep-clean your kitchen and bathroom. That’s a great place to start. But anyone you hire will need to know what that means for them in terms of what actual labor they’ll be needing to perform. You’ll need a list of things you want to have done.
You’ll also need to have a sense of how much labor, or how intense a cleaning, you’re asking for. Deep-cleaning a kitchen that is badly cluttered, or where there is a large quantity of stuff that isn’t particularly well organized, or where there is a lot of very heavy or extensive dirt, or all of the above, has different demands than deep-cleaning a kitchen where those things aren’t the case. Do you want your deep-cleaning to include emptying out, cleaning, and putting things back in cupboards, drawers, and pantries? Cleaning the range top and the microwave oven (if you have one) is pretty standard, but you should consider whether the cleaning will include cleaning an oven, appliances like air fryers or toaster ovens, and how long it’s been since these various things have been cleaned and what kind of shape they’re in. Same goes for your fridge and freezer: what’s the situation like in those? What do you expect your employee to do? Are they willing to do it? Will they charge extra for it? Basic housecleaning doesn’t necessarily include tasks like cleaning out your fridge.
You’ll need to assess how much you will need to do before you can have someone come in to do the heavy work, and talk about this with your potential employee. There are some basics, like that whoever deep-cleans your kitchen will need to be able to have access to a working sink. But there are also things that you might not think about: are you hiring this person to do your dishes? If you aren’t, but you leave a sink full of dishes when your cleaner arrives, that means the cleaner doesn’t have access to your sink… unless they either move the dishes or do them, and unless that’s something they’ve agreed to do, it’s not fair to just expect them to handle it. Either you’ll negotiate that with them ahead of time, or you will need to deal with those dishes and leave your employee with clear access to the sink like you said you would.
You’ll also want to consider how much sorting, organizing, and labeling of your stuff you want to do before your workers arrive. Discuss this with them if you’re not sure what to do or what would be helpful. At the very least, make sure that both you and your employee know what things shouldn’t be thrown away when they’re cleaning. You may not be there when they’re working, and they don’t want to have to stop and ask you about every single item they encounter, either.
To this point: when you’ve hired someone, you’re an employer and your house is a workplace. If you would find it inappropriate for your employer to leave a particular personal possession lying around in your workplace, maybe you don’t want to leave it lying around in someone else’s. A housecleaner generally won’t throw away something like a kitchen knife, after all, but if they find an unmarked plastic bag of dried plant matter on the counter they could very easily throw away your supply of… oregano. Or they may choose to, er, cook with it themselves. I wouldn’t really blame them.
I hope I don’t need to say that leaving high-value or questionably legal items around someone else’s workplace as a “test” of an employee’s honesty or ability to resist temptation is a serious dick move. It’s also a major dick move to expose someone you’ve hired to potential legal liabilities not of their own choosing, so if you live somewhere that something you own isn’t actually legal, don’t expect your employees to handle it or clean it or even move it out of their way. If you are enough of an idiot to expect them to interact with your illegal crap, don’t go getting all butthurt if that doesn’t go the way you want it to. Your choices about handling things that aren’t legally sanctioned are your business, as are any consequences of your choices. It’s your job to make real damn sure they stay that way.
