Confessions of a House Cleaner

Confessions of a house cleaner. No, these aren’t my personal confessions, but dirty secrets about what you wouldn’t expect to find inside a person’s house from looking at it from the outside! As a professional house cleaner, I love the hours and flexibility of the job, and the money isn’t too shabby either. I supplement my cleaning job with small gigs like writing for this site. For the most part, I love my cleaning job but there are days I gasp as I walk into someone’s house when it looks like a tornado just blew in from Kansas. I expect to see Dorothy or the wicked witch hiding around the corner in the bathroom!

It use to be that house cleaners were only for the rich and famous. Not these days. Life is hectic and busy, and even with problems in the job market and the cost of rising gas, it seems that the business of house cleaning remains big business. Middle-class people will pay for house cleaning because they don’t have time anymore. Husband and wife both work, add in kids, after-school activities and other gatherings, and they just don’t have time. That’s where I come into the picture. But even having a house cleaner to do their dirty work, it seems that they would at least pick up the house on a daily basis or do some type of general cleaning during the week or weeks I am not there.

Some of the people I clean for are professionals … Lawyers, nurses, people in high-management positions. From the outside they seem to be perfect. They dress well, drive very nice cars and have large homes in upper-class neighborhoods. Looking in from the outside, you would imagine that their homes are spotless. Wrong! I have seen things cleaning houses that make me gasp and then churn my stomach. Filthy bathrooms that haven’t seen cleaning products except for when I show up and use them. Nasty toilets and sinks that would make a person gag, and have made me gag one more than one occasion. After the gagging process is over, I swear. When nobody is home, I swear loudly. I think to myself, “how can people live like this?” “How can these people who seem to have it all, live like the slobs that they are?” sigh…

I understand clutter, believe me I do. I have it myself. But what I cannot understand is how people can live in a home full of filth and disgusting germs! Microwaves that are so dirty it takes a half hour to clean them. Kitchen counters that are littered with crumbs that seem to have been there from the caveman era. Bathroom showers that have the stench of rotting hair and mildew, with the majority of the hair still stuck in the drain as huge clumps that seem to have a life of their own. Trash cans that don’t have bags inside them, and things stuck to the bottom of the can after you empty it, like gum, tissues full of mucus and things that you don’t even want to guess at what they are!

Again, this is my job- to clean houses. But all I ask is that people try to put themselves in my shoes for once and ask themselves if they would want to clean the nasty brown feces that is still stuck around the toilet rim that’s been left for two weeks. Even though it is my job, I do have limits. I have forced myself to have limits. I have even seen pet accidents on carpets which I use to clean. Use to are the key words here. It use to bother me so much that I would do it. I finally got a backbone and said “NO I will not do this anymore, I have limits and self-dignity!” I will not clean a bathroom counter that cannot even be found! I will clean the mirror and sink, but if you have half of the Walmart health & beauty products sitting on it, I won’t touch it. A huge pile of dirty dishes when the dishwasher is full of clean ones? Nope, won’t do them. I am a house cleaner, not a housekeeper. If you want someone to pick up after you, your kids and your pets- go find yourself a maid.