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Here are 5 honest reasons why I don’t have a cleaning service. Are you paying hundreds of dollars to have someone else clean your home? You might need to hear this real talk.
We all want a clean home. I used to pay a cleaning service to clean my home. With a slightly larger than average home, I paid the cleaning service hundreds of dollars every month.
I had no issues with the service itself. The company was honest and responsible. The cleaners showed up on time and consistently. They provided a decent cleaning job. But, as time went on, I started to question whether having a cleaning service was a good idea or not for me and my family. I ultimately decided it was not. Here’s why.
Table of Contents
Who should have a cleaning service?
There are plenty of people out there who love their house cleaning services, and that’s great. I’m not here to shame anyone who needs assistance with keeping a clean house. If you have a physical impairment, are differently abled, just had a baby, are recovering from surgery, a cleaning service might be your saving grace.
Who should not have home cleaning services?
The honest answer? Most of us should not have a cleaning service. This might make you angry to read. Who’s this lady on the internet telling me what to do? Hear me out. I’m writing this article because I wish someone would have had this real talk with me years ago. It would have saved me so much money, and I would have developed better cleaning habits years before I actually did.
My Cleaning Routine Without A Cleaning Service
We have so many amazing blog posts about building good cleaning habits! Cleaning your own home might seem overwhelming at first, but read up on how to slowly build a solid cleaning routine.
Reason #1: MONEY
Yep, I’m going there. The #1 reason for not having a cleaning service is money. Cleaners work hard and should be paid fairly for their work, but once I took a hard look at my personal budget, I knew a cleaning service just couldn’t be justified.
Maybe a cleaning service fits nicely in your monthly spending budget. Even if you have the money for a cleaning service, you are still spending money you don’t have to spend. Take a moment to calculate how much money you are spending yearly on a cleaning service. I added up how much my family was spending on this, and I wrote that number on a piece of paper. Staring at it in black and white made that very large number sink in for me.
I realized just how many other things we could do with that money – travel, fix up the house, work less because we needed to earn less, sign a child up for violin lessons. That money could serve our family in so many better ways.
Reason #2: I can do a better job.
My cleaning service was recommended by so many people I knew. They had years of experience and cleaning authority, and they did a good job . . . at first.
I have used several cleaning services over the years, and it’s always the same thing. The cleaning service gets in your door with a free estimate or maybe a discounted one-time cleaning. They do an amazing job for the first several months, and then slowly, the work quality goes down. Whether it’s a monthly cleaning service, bi-weekly cleaning, or weekly cleaning service, it’s always the same. Once they have comfortably established me as a customer, they don’t try as hard to clean. It’s just a fact.
I can do a better job cleaning because this is my house, and I care what it looks like. My family lives here, so I want to make sure to disinfect the germy surfaces and organize the toys and books the right way.
Reason #3: I have kids.
This reason has two parts:
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Kids make a mess.
Kids are messy! My three kids make messes that need to be cleaned every day. You might think that having a cleaning service would help with these kid messes, but instead, it felt like just the opposite.
The cleaning service would come on Monday, so the house would be clean on Monday. But what about the rest of the week? We still had to clean the house on Tuesday because the kids had made new messes that day.
I asked myself what value the cleaning service was really providing if I had to clean the house all over again a mere 24 hours later.
2.Kids are watching.
I want my kids to see me and their father clean the house. They need to see that we care about and respect our home. I want my kids to see that in our family, we work hard to take care of our responsibilities. There are a million ways to role model responsible leadership behavior to your kids, and cleaning your house is definitely one of them.
Reason #4: I’m too busy.
Have you ever seen the meme where the woman is exhausted because she just cleaned the house so the maid could come clean the house? “Pre-cleaning” for the cleaning service is time consuming.
When I had a cleaning service, I didn’t see a need to have good daily cleaning habits. Why? I pay a service to do that for me. So, when it came time for the cleaners to come, I had so much to do before they could clean.
Most cleaning services don’t pick up toys, organize clutter, hang up clothes, reshelve books, or do the dishes. You have to do that before they come, and it takes a lot of time. When a cleaning crew comes on a specific time schedule, you have to clean before they come no matter what. I need more flexibility in my week.
Once I stopped using a cleaning service as a crutch, I developed cleaning habits that help me get my home clean using small increments of time on a daily basis instead of being forced to do one giant panic clean every time the cleaners were on their way.
Reason #5: The value didn’t reflect the price.
We’ve already talked about the money, but now let’s talk about the value of a cleaning service. You might say that a cleaning service provides a high level of value to your life, and I’m not telling you that you’re wrong. I just want you to stop and think more deeply about your decision.
In reason #4, we talked about the “pre-cleaning” that needs to take place before the cleaners come. I had an epiphany one day after I had pre-cleaned my house minutes before the cleaners arrived to clean my home.
I had put all of the toys away. The clutter was cleared. The dishes were done and put away. The laundry was folded and put into drawers. I looked around my house and realized it was 90 percent clean after my pre-cleaning. The only things left to do were dust, vacuum and mop the floors, and clean the bathrooms. In total, the jobs left to do might take me another hour.
I was paying someone a lot of money to come in and do the last few cleaning tasks on my to-do list. Why? Did that value really reflect the cost I was paying? I didn’t think so.
Conclusion
Cleaning services can come at a high cost. I have found that this cost isn’t worth the value added to my family’s life. Read my reasons why and decide whether or not a cleaning service is right for you.
Ashley Donati is a contributing writer for A Mess Free Life. A self-described naturally messy person, Ashley spent years learning how to keep a clean and organized home through trial, error, and a lot of great books. She writes about cleaning systems, decluttering, and home organization for people who weren’t born with the tidy gene.
