Our £500-a-month cleaners saved our marriage
When I arrived home from a recent work trip, I dumped all the clothes from my suitcase on the bedroom floor and left them there for a few days. I’m a naturally messy person (albeit one with good intentions) but between my full-time job at an investment fund and the demands of my 3-year-old daughter, I just couldn’t find the time to put them away.
Ten years ago, this would have led to an explosive row with my husband, but this time not a single cross word was exchanged. And no, we haven’t grown as people; we just have two cleaners who came in later that week and quietly sorted through the pile, putting away the clean clothes and washing and ironing everything else.
I credit the eight hours of cleaning I pay for each week with keeping my marriage happy and healthy – and maybe even saving it. I’ve never been good at tidying – my mother might have described my teenage bedroom as a pigsty – but my husband, Vaughn, likes to think of himself as a neat freak.
There’s nothing I dread more than changing the sheets or emptying the dishwasher, while he wants to start each weekend with a house that looks like it belongs in a film set. When we first met in Australia 15 years ago we could gloss over this fundamental difference between us but now, in our late 30s in London with a toddler in tow, it would lead to endless rows if we had no help.
In fact, for a long time, it did. Vaughn would come home from work, find my clothes all over the place and get angry. I needed him to understand that after a long day I just didn’t have the energy to sort them out, and that nobody enjoys being harangued all the time in their own house. He probably needed me to understand that the mess stressed him out.
Sometimes on weekends, he would reach the end of his tether and initiate a “clear-out”, which usually meant randomly chucking things away. More than once I had to rescue clothes, important documents or books I wanted to keep directly from the bin. Almost always, these clear-outs would end in an argument.
Things got messier and messier at home in the years before my daughter was born – and more and more fraught. At this point, we both had full-time jobs and had already taken the plunge in hiring a cleaner, but only for a couple of hours once a fortnight and it simply wasn’t enough. So I then went further and increased my cleaner’s hours – it immediately felt like a weight had been lifted.
Now, I even have a second. That means I use a sizeable chunk of my salary to outsource nearly all our housework, but I don’t feel guilty about it. Most people I know only pay for a couple of hours of cleaning once a week, or even once every two weeks, while I spend close to £500 a month. But employing two different women means every inch of our north London house is covered.
One of them – who was even invited to our daughter’s birthday party – is there for six hours on a Tuesday. She not only cleans the entire house (including clearing out the fridge, changing the sheets and scrubbing the oven) but also does a load of laundry and hangs it up. Another woman comes on a Friday and I would describe her role as closer to a housekeeper than a cleaner as she sorts out all the washing from Tuesday, puts a fresh load on, organises my clothes, tidies the toys and generally has the house ready for the weekend.
At first Vaughn thought this was excessive and argued that the money might be better spent elsewhere, but given I pay for it out of my salary he didn’t have much of a leg to stand on – and, anyway, he now sees the benefit. Despite the fact he thinks he is clean, he enjoys not having to do as much tidying or laundry as he did before. And as he is much more pedantic about the house looking perfect, it must be a relief not to have to nitpick all the time.
I can’t tell you how good it feels to have the mental load entirely removed. I barely have to think about having our clothes washed and ready for the week ahead and never have to worry about cleaning – it’s a part of my life that is completely managed. I have a demanding job and instead of opening the door in the evening to chaos and a less-than-impressed husband , I arrive home to a perfectly tidy house and a happy man. Best of all, I can spend my free time out and about in London or playing with my daughter instead of doing deathly dull jobs.
And while I am lucky to be able to afford this without having to sacrifice in other parts of my life, I would happily live on Tesco meal deals every day of the week if that were the only way to keep the cleaners. Honestly, it’s hard enough to raise children alongside a full-time job without bickering with your spouse about whose turn it is to empty the bin.
As told to Melissa Twigg
