“If someone had told me you would become a professional house cleaner ten years ago, I would have laughed them off my house!” That’s my mum’s favourite comment about my career path, which always brings my 5-year-old twin daughters (born and bred in London) to hysterical laughter. She is right, of course. No one who knew me at eighteen would have ever seen professional cleaning in my future. Let me tell you the whole story of my transition from a housekeeping sloth to a domestic cleaning wizard.
It’s not that I didn’t know how to clean when I was a teenager – I just never quite saw the point of it. Mum insisted on me vacuum-clean my room every week, but we reached a tentative truce on a fortnight. I would do it, and my room would get messy within the next few days. The argument that you should do the cleaning for its own sake was not particularly convincing. “I am afraid one day we will have to take you to the ER with dysentery, typhus or bubonic plague.” Mum would sigh with resignation, roll up her sleeves and put my room in order.
Things got a little better when I moved from my parent’s house to my first rented flat in Winchmore Hill. Of course, I couldn’t afford to live on my own and split the rent with my bestie, Susan. We were both trying to figure out what we wanted to do with our lives (Susie found her calling in spa and wellness and today runs one of the best wellness centres in North London). She might not have been as strict as Mum, but I couldn’t wave her off as I did when I was a teenager. She would never take credit for it, but she was the person who instilled my first regular home cleaning habits.
Fast forward a few years. I was now happily married and lived in a spacious apartment next to Milner Square in Islington. My husband and I had welcomed our beautiful baby twins, who kept me busy 24/7. While pregnant, I devoured a few dozen books on raising kids, creating the perfect home, and avoiding the most common health-related issues. Gone were the days of my laissez-faire attitude towards cleaning – my daughters would grow up in a perfectly ordered and comfortable home, not a chaotic pile of clothes, bags of Pampers and toys all across the floor.
Our girls were six months old when the first signs of some health problem occurred. They would start coughing and crying all night, have a fever and problems breathing. I can honestly say I had never been so freaked out in my life – until the test results came back. It turned out that both of our daughters had a mild dust allergy. “It is not uncommon among toddlers, and I know it is very stressful for the parents. But the more they grow up, the less pronounced their symptoms will become”, assured us our paediatrician, Dr. Smith.
Dr. Smith, of course, was correct. But while I was sitting in his office, my panic had not subsided, and his calm words of comfort did not convince me. Throughout the next eighteen months, until the twins turned two, I was in full “helicopter-mom” mode. I have no idea how my husband put up with my obsessive-compulsive need to keep the apartment as clean as a surgery room. I was vacuuming twice weekly and doing a deep clean every fortnight. When I was not cleaning, cooking, or playing with the girls, I was watching housekeeping videos on YouTube and reading blogs by housemoms like me.
But the girls did turn two, and I could no longer deny that Dr. Smith had been correct all along. They would cough now and then, but we rarely had to use their inhalers. In the meantime, I had become one mean cleaning machine. I also joined a Facebook group of local Islington young mums who shared their everyday experience raising kids. One of the common threads in many conversations was how burdensome cleaning could be. Many mums complained that it sapped their energy, and they would give anything for someone else to do it.
I commiserated with them, but the seed was already planted in my brain. If practice makes perfect, I had perfected the art of speed cleaning without compromising efficiency. Besides, my husband would often tease me that “you could do this for a living”, not realising how close to the mark he was.
Then, one day, it happened. Beatrice, one of the youngest mums in our Facebook group, apparently had a rough day. She posted a few pics of her kitchen before and after cleaning, accompanied by a 300-word rant on how it took her three hours to scrub the whole thing. Beatrice was not much younger than me, and we had numerous long chats. I really wanted to help her without sounding creepy, so I sent her the following message (I still keep it in my chat history):
"Hey, I bet I could have cleaned the kitchen faster than you :). I can help you with the cleaning if you want, I am sure we can figure out something that works for both of us. Check the going rates for home cleaning help and tell me what you think."
At first, Bee (as we all call her) thought I was teasing her. But when she found out I was serious, she was on cloud nine! “I wanted to book a home cleaner for a long time, but I have trust issues and letting a stranger in my house will be a major issue”, she confessed. We immediately set a reasonable price for a visit based on the median price of three local domestic cleaning offers on the Internet.
My husband could not have been more supportive. “If you want this on your plate and you are certain that you can cope with it, go ahead!” When I told my mum, she looked at me, her mouth agape as if she had seen an alien. She shook her head and muttered: “If someone had told me you would become a professional house cleaner ten years ago, I would have laughed them off my house!”
