My Love/Hate Relationship With My Housekeeper(s) Has Come To An End.
Yes, I have been fortunate enough to be able to have someone help clean my house once every two weeks. We do a reasonable job of keeping up the day to day, but it is a luxury to have someone come in every couple of weeks to do the heavy lifting. Unfortunately, that “luxury” often comes at a price beyond the cash payment. There have also been the broken knick-knacks that we aren’t told about, the unfortunate destruction of a stainless panel on my stove with Easy-Off Oven Cleaner ($600 to fix), vacuum cleaner parts that mysteriously break (New Vacuum Needed Soon), bedding that doesn’t get changed because they couldn’t find the clean sheets that reside exactly where they always are and no one could ask me where they were when I was sitting 10 feet away……Anyway, you get the picture. After some debate, I decided that our relationship was no longer working.
And….this being the third housekeeper that we’ve had in the last 18 months (2 that we let go and 1 let go of us) I’ve decided that the best course of action is for me to just go back to being my own housekeeper.
So, anyone that knows me relatively well knows that I am susceptible to any new cleaning trend, fad, gadget or tool. Most gadgets tend to fail or be more trouble than a convenience so this Sunday I’m going to include a few of my favorite finds to help you when cleaning your own place.
The Tineco iFloor Vacuum Mop - While this says it is a Vac/Mop I will tell you that you will want to vacuum your floor first to get up the pet hair and dirt of your solid-surface floors before you pull out this machine. However, after the initial vacuum this little machine will make short work of your mopping. It does a great job of cleaning your hard-surface floors. Simply fill the water tank and push a button and let it do the work. The only thing you have to do is refill the water tank occasionally and clean out the waste water receptacle and filter. When you put the mop back on its stand it will do an auto clean of the brush and notify you of any additional maintenance. These aren’t the cheapest vac-mop, but the do offer a variety of price points and features, but we have found it to be well worth the money for the quality of the machine, the performance and the ease of maintenance.
The Fifth Start Cleaning Caddy - While you may have one of those shallow, hard plastic cleaning caddies that you can carry around your house, let me assure you that you can toss that in the trash and upgrade to this terrific caddy that moves room to room with you and keeps all of your stuff organized and right at your finger tips. This has saved so much time and effort for my former housekeepers and myself that I highly recommend it. Brushes and bottles don’t fall out and it holds so much more and it can be carried with the shoulder strap from room to room.
The 50 Pack of MicroFiber Cleaning Cloths - I love this 50 pack from Amazon. They come in four different colors. I use yellow for dishes and green for kitchen cleaning. Blue is for bathroom cleaning and orange is for furniture and polishing. My paper towel consumption has been reduced dramatically and they make clean ups super easy. They are inexpensive and do a good job. However, be sure to only wash them with other colored microfiber or your white dishtowels may become your tie-dye dish towels.
Which Stuff to Clean / Cual Cosas Para Limpiar
Whether you are cleaning for yourself or having someone help you I have found it’s a good idea to keep a check list of the items that need to be done. When my housekeeper kept forgetting to do certain items or insisting that I didn’t communicate that certain things were part of our agreement I found it to be best to make a list so we would be clear. It was necessary to make the list in Spanish for her, but Google Translate and Chat GPT made short work of that. I’m going to leave two links below and you can download my lists in English and Spanish and then tailor them to your needs:
I’ve got to go clean some more stuff now. Taking over this task has now led to organizing, painting and deep cleaning and I’ve got a pretty long list of things to manage this week. Next week we’ll try to talk about more glamorous stuff.
