We never had anyone come and clean, as much as my mom would have liked. My dad did call me Cinderfella though. . .
If your status is baller enough to afford a cleaning person/service why in gods green earth would you do their job for them? I want a job where my bosses do the large majority of my job for me. That would be sweet like being a hooker who's johns all beat off before they show up and just want a five minute cuddle to wrap things up.
Yeah...my mom would clean the house top to bottom the day before the cleaning people came. You could eat off the floor it was so clean. For all I know, the cleaning crew comes in, sprays some cleaner so it smells different and watches telenovellas for 2 hours.
I am pretty sure there are johns who only wan that. Look at Charlie in Young Guns. Sometimes you just want to be held. We're not pieces of meat.
I used to have a Mexican come in and clean my house once a week. Just to make sure she earned her money I occasionally used her as a toilet.
I had a couple Maids come in and do my move-out clean on my apartment. It was $30/hr and it was totally worth it. I should have been getting a maid in once a month, and I will do so when I get back to the states.
I tidy shit up, mostly because she doesn't know where we keep stuff, so I cant expect her to do that. I also make the bed, and make sure the dishes are put in the dishwasher or away, but I do that most days before I leave anyway. Things I don't do is dust, vacuum, take out trash, scrub toilets, etc. I figure I am paying her for the deeper cleaning things I don't want to do, not the stuff I do on a daily basis.
I have a cleaning lady come once a week for 50 bucks and I usually give her a little extra at the end of the month because its so worth it. Always go with an old Polish lady.
We had a Brazilian husband/wife team for a while clean out house and their daughter was learning the family trade as well and, if it is at all possible, I highly suggest the hot Brazilian girl with a penchant for absurdly low cut jeans and thongs.
Polish cleaning ladies are great, but here in Texas, housecleaning is just another market cornered by the Mexicans which in our experience has been hit or miss. Anytime we've found one that was good, 6 months later she was either having another kid or heading back to Mexico. The only hired cleaning we have done now is windows and carpeting.
I think some of my sister's cleaning ladies ONLY wanted to tidy up...and my sister is hella messy. I am with you though. I would rather round up my own dirty underwear and make the bed and have someone else scrub the grout on the tile (which btw, I probably need to get crackin on before my parents get here on Tuesday). However, since I am quasi-mostly-unemployed and do all the housework and such, there is no excuse. Plus our apartment is 700sf so there is REALLY no excuse. I think my sister gets a pass with her 5000sf house and special needs kid who has been known to smear poo on the TV screen and couch.
Cleaning ladies typically dust, vaccuum, sweep/mop, wash windows (interior) and clean the bathrooms. The kind of stuff you'd do once a week or every other week but instead you pay someone to save you time and do a better job of it anyhow. I'm not sure what your mom means by "tidy some of your stuff up", but if you're leaving your dirty gitch on your bedroom floor for the cleaning lady to find while shes vacuuming, then yeah, that's so disrespectful.
I wonder if I could convince this potential cleaning person to also weed my lawn. Because it's dandelion season, bitches. AND THEY ARE FUCKING EVERYWHERE.
The pesticides you all have in the US are leaps and bounds better than ours... The one time I used our version of roundup, it killed the grass and the dandelions just mocked me as they stood alive and proud in the middle of the shriveled and dying lawn.
Roundup kills it all. I think my dad has enough roundup in his shed back home to kill all the vegetation in the state of Alabama. My aunt did some study as part of her Master's? PhD? I don't remember, but basically she showed that you can dip individual plant's leaves in the roundup to kill them. The leaves will absorb the pesticide and you can target individual plants instead of killing your whole lawn. It's a slower process, but you can kill whole small saplings and things like that. Alternately, you could dip your rubber gloved hands in the roundup and touch the heads of the dandelions and other pesky, taller weeds, and again, avoid killing your actual plants.