Maid Service & House Cleaning Blog

How Do I Determine Maid Service Costs?

The simple answer is it varies! The easiest way to get good service at a fair price is by a recommendation from someone you know and trust. Barring that, you might need to interview several cleaning services before finding the right one for you. Always ask for a home inspection before hiring a service. In the mad rush of today’s fast paced world, you might be tempted to rely on a phone quote without having met anyone from the service. A lot of services will provide phone quotes that are often lower than the actual cost just to “get your business” only to end the day with nasty add on pricing or up-charges.

What are the factors that determine Cost?

When you purchase cleaning services, what you are actually purchasing is time. Let me explain. The degree of difficulty is not challenging, but the physical labor and time commitment is critical. Cleaning estimates really boil down to how much time it is going to take and what the degree of physical activity is needed to accomplish the cleaning tasks. Let’s look at a few factors:

Location: The realtors have made this abundantly clear “Location, Location, Location”. The same is true when it comes to a cleaning service. If your dwelling is in Miami, FL., you can expect to pay more than if you reside in Waco, TX. If you live in the city, you have many competing service providers to choose from. However, if the closest grocery store is two dirt roads, a railroad crossing, and a quarter tank of gasoline away, you need to expect to pay more for service. Not only the expense in getting to your location, but the travel time as well.

General House Keeping Tidiness: You have to determine the tasks that you want the house keeping service to perform. If your house is in a relatively tidy condition, your house keeper can concentrate on cleaning tasks like scrubbing the toilets, sinks, and bathtubs. Otherwise, you pay an increased cost because the service has to “clean-up” before they actually start to clean.

Square Footage: Yes, size does matter. The larger the home, the larger the price tag. If you have areas of the home that are not used and you don’t want cleaned, you can let the service know so that area is not calculated in the price. However, if you own a 4000 square foot home and only want one bedroom, one bathroom, and the kitchen to be cleaned, don’t expect the price to be the same as cleaning your former one bed one bath apartment. The larger home has larger areas and it takes more time to do the same services.

Frequency of Cleaning: Expect to pay more for initial cleanings, and once a month cleanings. Discounts start to take effect with bi-monthly cleanings and even larger discounts for weekly cleanings. If you need daily cleanings you should really not be hiring a maid service, but just in fact hire a maid.

Who Resides in the Home: This leads back to the general tidiness of the house. If you have teenagers with typical teenager bedrooms, expect to pay more since the service will probably have to Tidy-Up before actually starting to clean. Pets can also lead to increased costs. If you have pets in the house, they should be in a safe place away from the house keepers while the clean. If you pet sheds, this defiantly adds to the cost of cleaning. Pet hair is extremely hard to remove and time consuming.

Extra Items: Know what is considered “customary” and what is considered an extra by your maid service provider. Generally, things like cleaning an oven, the inside of the refrigerator, windows are considered extra.

On a final note, make sure that you and your service provider agree on a price before the work is started. Contracts are not customary, but can be used in special situation if the work is extensive or happens over a multiday period. Your service provider should be happy to provide you with a receipt for payment of services. If you find you need maid service in the Austin Texas area, I encourage you to check out Teresa’s Tidy-up.

Teresa owns and manages Teresa’s Tidy-Up maid service in Austin Texas.
http://austinmaid.net

I think that we all can agree on the simple fact that house cleaning can be a chore. It can be even more daunting and tiresome when we are not effectively organized in our cleaning methods. A house cleaning list is one of a few different tools that we can use to get better organized, goal oriented, and more effective when cleaning house overall.

The purpose of a cleaning list is simply to help us not have to remember what needs to be cleaned, and when something needs to be cleaned. All cleaning requirements around the house are suggested by professionals, based upon what they are, to be taken care of on a daily, weekly, monthly, semi-annual, and yearly basis. When we create a complete list of all the cleaning requirements for our home, organized based upon their time requirements, we have effectively created for ourselves a cleaning list that will serve us for as long as we will be cleaning house.

I often find in many cases that people clean their homes based upon how dirty they realize an area has become. The problem with this approach is once an area is cleaned, we let the area sit until it becomes dirty again. The length of time it takes for a specific area to get dirty always varies, so it’s indeterminable when the area should actually be cleaned. The usefulness of the cleaning list really comes through in this respect. A cleaning list will be able to tell you exactly when any area of the house needs to be cleaned. And if you continue to follow a cleaning list you will be able to cut down the length of time it normally takes you to clean house.

Let’s follow a simple example so that I can illustrate for you the process and way this works. Let’s use the Bathroom for example. In my own household the bathroom was a room that was cleaned anywhere from a few weeks to a few months after it had been cleaned. When I began using a cleaning list, it showed me to clean my bathroom at least once every week. When I started cleaning the bathroom according to my list I realized the bathroom afterward always seemed to stay clean and very seldom got extremely dirty. It didn’t accumulate much dirt and didn’t require much effort on my part when it was time for its weekly scrub down. The amount of time that I normally spent in the bathroom ranged anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour. Once I began using a cleaning list my time was drastically cut to about 10 to 15 minutes. Talk about a time saver!

What’s great about following a cleaning list is that it opens up the usefulness of another tool – a Cleaning Schedule. A cleaning schedule and cleaning list go hand-in-hand; like two peas in a pod. Although a cleaning list and schedule can be used separately, if you’re going to use one you might as well use the other. The list is really the preliminary step to using a cleaning schedule; it sets up and organizes all the information you will need – then you just plug it in and voila! This will effectively set you up so that all your cleaning chores are labeled and listed accordingly in a daily, weekly, monthly, semi-annual, and yearly basis category. All that will be required of you is to stay consistent. Once we fail in our consistency the whole process begins to tumble and we fall back into bad habits.

In order to make our lives easier when it comes to house cleaning I highly advise looking into creating a cleaning list and schedule to serve you when cleaning house. These two tools when used together create a powerful solution to save us time and energy when cleaning our house. These tools alone also guarantee long-term effectiveness that can last as long as we want as long as we are consistent when using them.

Debra Marks is a House Cleaning expert and author. For more great tips on how to construct a house cleaning list, you can visit http://www.simplehousecleaning.com a website dedicated to providing quality information on house cleaning.

Spring Cleaning time is here again. Time to get organized and start letting go of the old and let the new in! There is know better time then now to hire some cleaning professionals to help you with all your cleaning issues.

A maid service can really help, by giving you the freedom to organize and sort through your things.

One idea is to hire a maid service.

Then go through your things and have a garage sale. Sell anything you have not used over the last 12 months. Have fun and enjoy the process. You will have a clean home and it will be open to the vacuum law of prosperity to all the new abundance in!

Here is to a great Spring Cleaning Holiday and to you Having an abundant new year!

Sun Cleaning Maid Service & House Cleaning has reached the 20 year mark! It is really exciting to see a house cleaning service or commercial cleaner reach that threshold. Sun Cleaning has been in South Florida for over 20 years and started with 1 person cleaning homes and now has grown into South Florida’s largest privately owned cleaning company.

MaidServiceBlog.com celebrates Sun Cleaning’s 20 years of service to the house cleaning industry! Great job Sun Cleaning!