A Perfect House Cleaning Service?
A perfect house cleaning service, let alone a perfect client? OK – this sounds like a work of fiction, we all know that perfection is not possible, so we’ll start somewhere below that pinnacle, no matter how hard we strive for it.
The Ideal Client
If there was an ideal client (from my point of view), they would be a two-income family with 1 or 2 children, a cat and a dog (the pets are also known as ‘job security’. These would be busy, productive people with a lot on their plates, looking for some help to keep their home clean without robbing their own precious free time every weekend. These would be well-trained children, who hang up their clothes or toss them into the laundry without nagging. The dog would be trained to wipe his paws on the doormats provided at every entry. The cat would be either a neat litter box user or one who prefers the wooded border of the backyard for his calls to nature.
The Ideal Cleaners
These ideal cleaners would arrive, preferably after the clients left the house on Monday, so that the house was at its dirtiest from the weekend and their clean-up would basically last all week. You (the perfect client) wouldn’t see these elves, but little notes would be left in exchange for the weekly check left on the kitchen counter. When you opened the door that Monday evening you really would say “Ah — it’s so nice to come home to a clean house.”
Reality Check
It seems so simple. But the reality is often short of this. Caulk gets moldy despite weekly treatments–a bit like mowing dandelions, only to see them pop up again before the grass is ready for its next mowing. Pets make a mess. The cat prefers the napped fabric chair (they never seem attracted to the easy-to-clean wooden chair, do they?) The kids leave toys, clothes and dirty underwear on the floor, under the bed and in their bathroom. The cook in the family seems to have trained at the ‘flinging school of cooking’ and the cry of ‘who moved the papers on my desk?!’ rises following an over-industrious cleaning.
A Working Partnership
The truth is, the best cleaning services and the best clients arrive at a working partnership. The home-owners complete their own daily clean-up, they communicate to the crew if there’s an issue to deal with (you missed the cobweb over the fireplace last time) and accepts that every single surface of their home is not going to be cleaned every single time the crew arrives, despite everyone’s very best efforts.
For their part, the crew tries to flex as needed. They deal with heavy trash when college-age youngsters arrive or depart; they clean the tub and tile after the dog is bathed at home instead of at the groomers; they try to honor preferred beginning or ending time ranges whenever possible, strive to deal with the occasional unexpected ‘surprises’ like when 5 teens hold a sleep-over on the weekend and the baths and family room are a total wreck. The list, like life, goes on.
Truthfully, we give thanks for our clients. We consider it a privilege to help with this contribution to your domestic bliss. It’s not an ideal world–granted. You hope for good value and a healthy, clean house, we hope for a job well done, a little appreciation and a fair return on our efforts. Even imperfection can be well worthwhile. We still hope, every time, for that “Ah, it’s so nice to come home to a clean house”. Thank you for working with us as we strive to achieve that goal. Thank you for your business, your referrals, your appreciation.
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