While the main campaigns to rescue us from credit-crunch mode in 2009 will be
waged on the banking system, manufacturing infrastructure and what’s left of
the property industry, individual contributions on the home front will be
inescapable. You’ve already turned down the thermostat, cancelled the new
kitchen and rented out the spare room, but are you prepared for the ultimate
sacrifice – to sack the cleaner and embrace the new cult of MIY (mop it
yourself)?
Luckily for us civilians, cometh the hour, cometh the celeb, in this case
Anthea Turner. The buy-to-let property empire she built up with her husband,
Grant Bovey, has collapsed and their cleaning lady has filed a £7,800 claim
for unpaid wages for buffing up their show flats. Turner can now be seen
applying a kitchen cleaning product with her own fair hands – admittedly,
this is in a television advert for said product, but there is still a
pleasing appropriateness to the image.
So, with a worthy patron saint of austerity and Britain’s vigorous new spirit
of making do, doesn’t paying someone to clean your house start to look as
démodé as paying over the odds for a load of buy-to-let flats nobody wants
to rent?
“I know women who say that they’d rather not eat than lose their cleaner,”
says Niamh Hughes, a former advertising executive (although, given the
current state of the economy, they may soon have to forgo both). Then again,
she is the boss of Homebirds, a London-based cleaning company she started
two years ago with her own Bulgarian cleaner, Joy Rasheva.
They employ 30 women – 29 Bulgarians and a Pole – who receive “more than half”
of the £10.99 an hour paid by clients. Hughes admits that there was a
kneejerk reaction in the autumn, when the fall of Lehman Brothers heralded a
new phase of the economic collapse. “A few clients lost their jobs and
cancelled us, but one single gentleman, who’d lost his job in the City, came
back a week later, saying, ‘I’d rather go out looking for work than clean my
house.’ ” Ultimately, she feels, “people don’t like cleaning more than they
don’t like paying for it”.
My neighbour Mat Snow has a fancier way of putting it. “It’s about
cost-benefit analysis,” says the free-lance writer, who works at home in
their three-bedroom terrace while his wife, an education specialist, toils
in an office. “The fact of the matter is, I’m a poor-quality cleaner, and it
would take me much longer to perform to a lower standard than Olivier, our
French cleaner, does for £8.50 an hour.”
Ah, the old clueless-bloke gambit. Never mind that we’ll all be learning new
skills as the recession bites – taking our cue from brave little Turner – an
Englishman’s right to be blitheringly incompetent with a vacuum cleaner
remains sacrosanct.
Snow nevertheless concedes that he began to tighten his belt 18 months ago and
has saved £600 a year by cutting Olivier down from six hours a fortnight to
just three. “I won’t say we haven’t noticed any difference, but it’s worth
not having to find that extra £50 a month.”
Hughes reckons it’s the clients who use her service the least who are cutting
back. The nonworking yummy mummies in big houses, who want at least six
hours a week of cleaning (more if they get the ironing done), are making no
concessions at all. “A cleaner can save stress in a relationship,” she says
diplomatically, “and quite often it’s the husband who arranges the domestic
help.”
If the tough times do hit, the yummies might want to know that Hughes reckons
it takes four hours a week to accomplish the routine cleaning of a
three-bedroom, two-bathroom house.
Seven items an hour is the rate she sets for ironing.
So, how do you master the money-saving art of MIY? For a start, says Hughes,
forget the fancy ecofriendly products. “When I explain to clients that
ecofriendly cleaning takes longer, you have to rub harder and it leaves more
lime-scale, eco-cred becomes less important,” she says.
Help is also at hand from Flylady. net, an American motivational web-site with
a fanatical following among women struggling to cope with Chaos (“can’t have
anyone over syndrome”). Sign up for daily e-mails reminding you to “swish
and swipe”, take 15 minutes to declutter, shove in a load of washing – and
resolve never to go to bed until your kitchen sink is shiny.
The site also has moving personal testimonies from women who have followed its
advice and now have immaculate homes and all-round better lives. Sample:
“Today, you are to sweep the front porch area around your front door. Shake
out your welcome mats and wipe down your door. We have a tendency to neglect
this area, yet it is the first thing people see when they come to your
home.” All pretty obvious, but those persistent folksy nudges (and they’ll
Twitter you now, too) can help get the job done, spit-spot.
Not me, do I hear you say? Friends and colleagues who can find their way round
Lidl blindfolded, and wield a savage hand on the heating thermostat, are
still adamant that the cleaner stays. As work gets more stressful and
demanding, the price of coming home to a clean and tidy house is seen as
essential expenditure. For now.
Employing a cleaner brings its own problems. The biggest is communication: a
note on the kitchen table is not the best way to tell some poor lass from
Latvia that you are displeased with the shine on the bathroom taps. And,
these days, English is unlikely to be your cleaner’s first language. “I
can’t find a single English person who wants to clean someone’s house,”
Hughes says. Though there’s always the chance unemployed estate agents and
the wives of sacked hedge-fund traders will discover a new vocation that
pays £7-£12 an hour.
There are also indications of unrest in the poshest postcodes. Hughes claims
that whenever Homebirds delivers leaflets door-to-door on the smart streets
of Chelsea, the resident housekeepers destroy them before their employers
see there’s a cheaper alternative to the live-in domestic. So, while you
contemplate doing without a few hours’ ministrations a week, think about the
sacrifices others might be having to make.
Be your own domestic goddess
- Keep clutter to a minimum – the less there is to work round, the faster
you’ll go.
- Make your home a no-shoe zone: if people don’t tread dirt in, you won’t have
to clean it up. Buy groovy Moroccan slippers in a range of sizes for guests
to wear.
- Assign specific tasks to each member of the household and nag, rage and weep
tears of self-pity till they pull their weight.
- If you want to cut down, rather than give up on domestic help, work out
which areas you really don’t want to do yourself – you might find you’d
rather clean than iron.
- Get a daily routine going: swoosh round sinks and loos with throwaway wipes
every morning.
- You’re not running a five-star hotel – revise the length of time you can go
without changing the sheets and towels.
- Hire someone for a deep-clean day twice a year.
- Audiobooks are the perfect companion to domestic drudgery.
Its possible to get a cleaner for cheaper. Rates start at around £6 per hour for individual cleaners. You can compare rates of cleaners online (e.g. cleaningplace.co.uk) - saves making 100 phone calls!
Dave, London,
Radio 4 is the perfect companion to domestic drudgery, got me by for years
Alex, Chatham, UK
It is touching to hear howls from anguish from journalists, advertising executives, and other important professionals because they might get their hands dirty cleaning. Poor dears.
Chris K, Cheltenham, UK
£8.50/hour? Far better than my rubbish office job. Free physical workout, and I can listen to podcasts on my iPod too. If it'spaid cash in hand, there's the opportunity to avoid tax as well...
Jeff, London,
The nerve of telling me to clean my own house. I shan't, I simply shan't!
Melissa, London,