How much time do you spend cleaning your house?

I like a clean home but I don’t enjoy cleaning and I don’t like cleaning people going through my stuff.

So, after my divorce, I carefully chose a dwelling that would allow me to keep a clean home without spending hours a week on cleaning.

After years of being the primary cleaner of a 4-bedroom 2500sqft house and then a 2-bedroom 1000sqft condo, I felt like a 1-bedroom 550sqft condo was the perfect home for me.

I keep my home fairly uncluttered and I chose easy-to-clean finishes when I remodeled my condo (no carpets, no grout lines, etc…). This allows me to keep a clean house without much effort. I can dust the whole place in 10 minutes and a Roomba keeps the floor clean. Keeping my kitchen spotless is super easy as well, it usually requires a simple wipe down, no hard scrubbing necessary with an induction cooktop and seamless ceramic countertops. The only task that I truly despise remains cleaning the shower, especially because we have hard water here, but it is manageable.
 
Not much, we have a housekeeper every other week. Just the two of us.
 
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jgrdarrash said:
We hire a house cleaner once a month, 3 hours for $140. I think many in our area will do monthly but not quarterly.
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When I think of quarterly, I’m thinking moving furniture, wiping down base boards, wiping down all the window sills, etc. I think of that as a deep clean. I think it unlikely I’d get that from a monthly cleaning and frankly, I don’t think that level of cleaning is necessary monthly.

Maybe I should consider monthly and me and DW can do the quarterly stuff rather than the other way around. I wouldn’t mind at all paying someone $50/hour once a month. I was thinking quarterly would be around $250, so $1K per year.

I might also look into a better Roomba. My is dumb (and therefore irritating). It also doesn’t handle our rugs very well. It gets stuck on them when it goes from the flat floor (laminate) onto the rug.
 
All our floors are tile. Our "Shark" (like a Roomba) w*rks pretty well and self empties. We run it maybe 2 or 3 times/week. We clean the bathrooms when visible stains on anything. Cleaning is not our highest priority though we don't allow layers of volcanic dust off our mountain to form before we clean. YMMV
 
If you don't like to clean, then do NOT get a black light and shine it around after dark inside. I got one to find tomato horn worms on our tomato plants. They glow under UV light.
Even after sanitizing the bathroom, I couldn't believe how much was missed when looking using my black light after.
I recall one wall in the guest bedroom where my dad stayed after living with us a few years before his passing. I think he must have sneezed on that spot nightly. Ended up having to paint even though it looked perfect to the naked eye.
I can recommend this light if you're brave. Ha!
 
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When I retired in 2011 my first wife was still working. I would clean house on Friday morning so the house would be clean for the weekend. It was a small house, 950 sq ft, and became very efficient and could do everything in the morning.

Now I am remarried and living in Thailand. We have a bigger house in the countryside and have a full time housekeeper. It’s a little weird for me to pay someone else to do this but it gives someone a job. Six days a week for about $200/month.
 
We live in a 400 square foot condo so we don't spend a whole lot of time on cleaning. Maybe 30 minutes at most if we include deep cleaning the bathroom.
 
None! DW does it. I am the fixer, she is the cleaner and she cooks too which is a bonus. Funny actually, as she tells me cleaning sooths her soul. When she needs to take time out, she does some cleaning. Too much for my liking but I cannot convince her otherwise.
 
When my kids were little I cleaned the entire house weekly. Once I started college with 3 small children I lowered my standards and only swept, dusted and mopped once a month. This continued when I went to work and hired once a month cleaning. Obviously kitchens and bathrooms have to be done frequently.

Once I retired I did everything myself. Now my condo is 855 sq ft so much easier and faster to clean. Once a year I do all the curtains, baseboards, windows, etc.
 
DW and I fully clean our house every week on Mondays. It was Saturdays before we retired. Our house is 2400 sq foot. Takes 2 to 3 hours. We divide and conquer. She dusts ahead of me as I run the vacuum. At some point she starts on the bathrooms as I finish vacuuming the rooms and empty and clean it. Then I switch to mop duty and mop the floors. We have a dog and two cats (we had two dogs until a few weeks ago), so we clean often to stay on top of the dander and fur. We have covers on our furniture that we wash every two weeks.
 
I had someone clean my house every other week at $100 per session for several years until Covid hit in 2020 when the service was suspended.
I never resumed because my elderly dog started getting apprehensive about people he didn’t live with and would get very stressed out.
Then I retired at the end of 2021 and figured that I would continue to clean it so that’s where I’m currently at.

I’m not sure how long it actually takes- a few hours a week maybe?
I use a steam mop for the tile floors. It’s so easy.
I’ve found using a swiffer dry mop to get up the dust better than anything else I’ve tried on my LVP flooring. It also fits under furniture so I don’t have to move anything. After I swiffer I go over the flooring with bona. Seems to work well and honestly doesn’t take a lot of time.
It’s a lot easier to spend time cleaning when you don’t have 50,000 other things to get done before you go back to work.

The other things like baseboards and cabinets, light fixtures, whatever else I notice- I do before the holiday season and try to do before swimming season. Like most things in my life these days I don’t have a strict schedule.

I do need to schedule someone to clean the grout and windows.
 
We clean the house about once a week which entails vacuuming and cleaning the bathrooms. Usually about 1-2 hours. We wipe down the kitchen and clean counter tops after each dishwashing. But do a thorough appliance cleaning about once a month. Not much time involved. Detailed dusting is on occasion, usually an hour, however I’m looking up at the vigas in our living room and know it’s about time again. So, it depends is the answer. That was always a good answer when I mentored young engineers.
 
We are very tidy people, but I don't know how many hours we spend a week cleaning. We probably spend an hour a week just moving items off the floor before we run the roomba, and then putting it back in place. We are probably most lax in washing the windows which we only do twice a year. I do the outside while DW does the inside. We seldom have clutter or items out of place anywhere in the house.

I probably spend at least a couple hours a week cleaning in the garage, mopping the epoxy floor, polishing the stainless fridge doors, dusting the flat surfaces. Additionally I spend a bit of time organizing and optimizing the storage cabinets and tool cabinets.

If we were to put the house up for sale tomorrow, we would not need to do anything to prepare for showing.
 
aja8888 said:
Before my wife died, we had a cleaning service for once a month clean for $90/month. This was for a 2,000 sq, ft. house with two of us living in it.
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And after, you decided it not necessary to have cleaned? :D
 
My Roombas, both Hazel and Jeeves, as well as Rosey, my Braava mop, are far more diligent about regular cleaning than I am.
 
I only clean my home office, the garage and my workshop. Workshop gets cleaned every couple of days, garage hardly ever, and I spend about 4 hours a year cleaning my office.

DW cleans everything else
 
Okay, didn’t know whether to post this here or the Blow that Dough thread, but I have just hired a house cleaner. I dislike house cleaning, but I like a clean house. I have hired her for every other week. We will see how this goes. In the nineties I hired a cleaning service while I was working. I ended up stopping the service because I couldn’t see a difference when they had been here, except that they refolded the towels a different way. I’m excited to get this started. This is a big step for my frugal self. I do feel a twinge of guilt since I have the time and ability to do my own housework. I think I’ll get over it.
 
FIYes said:
Okay, didn’t know whether to post this here or the Blow that Dough thread, but I have just hired a house cleaner. I dislike house cleaning, but I like a clean house. I have hired her for every other week. We will see how this goes. In the nineties I hired a cleaning service while I was working. I ended up stopping the service because I couldn’t see a difference when they had been here, except that they refolded the towels a different way. I’m excited to get this started. This is a big step for my frugal self. I do feel a twinge of guilt since I have the time and ability to do my own housework. I think I’ll get over it.
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We started with a bi-weekly housecleaner about 10 years ago. It's one of the best things we have ever spent money on.
 
We are well organized, no clutter to speak of - but we don't clean as often as we should. One day we'll probably be forced to hire a housekeeper, but not until we're no longer able to do it ourselves.
 
The cleaning person comes every 2 weeks. We do pick up stuff, keep things reasonably neat, but no pure cleaning. We are on the same page on this concept.
 
MC Rider said:
Division of labor here too.
I do most outside stuff, she does inside stuff.
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Me too. Except I do all (100%) of the outside stuff. And living in the country on a bunch of acreage, there's a lot of stuff to do.
 
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