Is hiring a house cleaner right for your family?

The decision to hire a house cleaner or employ outside help for your home can be a tricky one. 

Juggling little children, work, homeschooling, and family life can feel like several full-time jobs 🙂 

If your to-do list rarely ‘gets done’ and you struggle to maintain a clean home, a house cleaner may be a good choice for your family.

Several years ago we hired cleaning help for a time, but then chose not to continue. Here are a few reasons why.

Understanding the difference between tidiness and cleanliness

Keeping on top of cleaning a house full of people and pets has often been likened to cleaning your teeth while eating biscuits. 

“What’s the point?” some may say. 

“It’s a never ending battle!” is another common complaint.

When we had a house full of only young children, I realised that there is actually a big difference between a TIDY home and a CLEAN home. 

I definitely value tidiness. I find visual clutter and a messy home stressful and overwhelming. If I don’t have much time, I will generally prioritise tidying over cleaning (although a quick check of toilets and sinks before visitors arrive is a non-negotiable!) 

Cleanliness is still something I aim for, but as long as our home is hygienic and the basics are covered, I have learned to call it good. With such a busy schedule and very little spare time, I have had to recognise that I am simply not in the season of a perfectly clean and curated home. 

It’s taken a while to genuinely feel at peace with that – I’m a high achiever and I have been known to rage-clean like a boss 😉 I also love to bless others with a peaceful, pleasant space to come into and that isn’t always possible when a lot of time is spent taking care of kids.

Even before having children, cleaning felt like an annoying interruption to my weekend routine. There always seemed to be so much to do! 

Breaking up tasks into those required ‘daily’, ‘weekly’, ‘monthly’, or ‘annually’ can help to prioritise things, but the reality is that those jobs still need to be done.

So whose responsibility is it to clean the house?

For stay-at-home mums, cleaning is often included under the banner of the wife’s roles as homemaker and carer of the house. 

In our home, Sam does the lion’s share of the heavy outside work and so we’ve chosen to divvy up our responsibilities to broadly cover INSIDE and OUTSIDE. 

There is a lot of wiggle room in that, though. I actually love going out into the garden, either to tend to the veggie patches, weed unsightly corners, shovel gravel, or rip out unwanted shrubs.

Likewise, when I ask about a specific task, Sam is more than willing to help around the house. This isn’t so much in the daily cleaning tasks, but certainly in the bigger jobs or if I’m feeling particularly swamped. 

As a working mum, there are also times when I need to reassess the balance of tasks because homeschooling and caring for the home can be harder in busier seasons of life.

The pros of hiring professional cleaners

For a few years, when my Norwex business was at its peak, Sam and I decided to outsource our general cleaning to a lovely lady who came for 2 hours a fortnight. This was the first time I had outsourced any of my ‘responsibilities’ so it felt like a big decision. 

In our experience, there were some definite pros to having some practical help around the home:

• In her set time, our cleaner was able to dust and vacuum main rooms, go over the bathroom and ensuite and wet areas. When our common areas were cleaned regularly, I had more time to do the important things I wanted to focus on.
• It was a great way to feel less overwhelmed when I honestly didn’t feel like I spent enough time cleaning and it gave me peace of mind knowing that I didn’t have to set aside time in my week for the cleaning process.
• Having assistance in the basic cleaning tasks meant I had more time to tackle thorough cleaning jobs that were on my list to do.
• It was a blessing and a privilege to be able to allocate some of our budget to help with jobs I didn’t love!

The cons of hiring professional cleaners

Despite the extra time I gained for other areas of our busy life, for us, there were some cons to hiring help. Even though our cleaner did a good job and was flexible to meet our unique needs, over time we felt that it was no longer such a good idea. 

For us, the cons included:

• The reality that the deep cleaning still needed doing. Things like windows, the oven, fridge, and freezer were still my responsibility. We only hired a cleaner for 2 hours per fortnight which meant that only the bare basics were covered. 
• The cleaner needed a TIDY house to be able to CLEAN! In our busy home, we were juggling normal family life, my business from home (which required space for stock and packing) and homeschooling. Any one of these could produce a lot of clutter and mess. Combine all three and I would frequently find myself up far too late the night before the cleaner was coming to tidy and pack up as many of our belongings as possible to enable her to clean properly! This felt very counterproductive and I sometimes wondered whether the preparation required cancelled out most of the benefit.
• Once I’d tidied the house to prepare for the cleaning lady, a clean house didn’t seem so important! Everything feels better when it’s tidy!
• It was also easier for our cleaner to come when we weren’t home (understandably!) and it became increasingly inconvenient to leave for a couple of hours at a set time each week. This was even more complicated when I had a newborn or toddler napping and we were moving our homeschooling from room to room to stay out of our cleaner’s way! 

With any family decision, it’s important to regularly reassess and reevaluate how well things are working. The pros and cons were part of this equation, but we also noticed the impact hiring a cleaner had on our children over a period of time. 

Switching back to family cleaning

After much thought, we chose to stop having a professional cleaning service. 

The tipping point came one lunchtime when a child accidentally spilled their bowl of messy food under the dining table, I heard him say ‘Never mind, Mrs *H will clean that up!”

I froze. Hhhhmmmm. Now on the one hand, I had no ethical issues with hiring help, especially when I was working several evenings a week on top of homeschooling our children. 

I did, however, have an aversion to our children growing up thinking that they didn’t need to help much around the home or clean up after themselves. After all, a familiar phrase at home was ‘The people that make the mess need to be responsible for clearing it up!’ 

I now felt determined to change our family’s pattern to enable the cleaning to be completed by us without external help.

We explained to the children that we were now a family cleaning team and that we felt it was the best choice for all of us. 

It took a little while to adjust – not least because I had got used to the bulk of our basic cleaning being done in one morning. We needed to create a new rhythm and try to find a system or scheduled cleaning session that worked for us. 

If you’re nervous about how you’ll cope without a cleaner, here are a few tips that we found really helpful.

When you stop having a hired cleaner

• First, establish YOUR goal or contented level of ‘clean’. For us, the goal is a clean (read ‘hygienic’) house with all members of the family helping at an age-appropriate level. There’s no point striving for perfection if your home is very ‘lived-in’, you have tiny children, or if you are in a challenging stage of life.
• Second, think about the best system or routine for your family. This should take into account your work commitments, the ages of your children, and how regularly you want to clean areas. 
• Finally, I suggest having a family meeting to make sure that everyone is on the same page with your new system. If, like us, you have had a cleaner in the past, it could be helpful to explain the reason for taking back the responsibility of the home and encouraging them to take charge of small tasks so they have some ownership.

Adjusting as a family

Once we had farewelled our cleaner, it took a few weeks to adjust to our new ‘normal’. 

It was good to teach our children the realities of looking after the whole home and to see them more aware of how they live when they’re responsible for helping clear up!

If you want to hear more about how our family of 9 keeps the home clean now, you can read all about it here.

I’d love to hear how your family manages the responsibility of cleaning – leave a comment to share your thoughts!