Clean House

I dream of a clean house where the floors are spotless, the windowsills are dust-free, and the grout in between the tiles is dirt-free. A house so clean it reeks of fabuloso - the blue one. To make this dream a reality, I need help. After going back and forth about hiring someone else to do the house cleaning, we have reached a compromise. We'll get it professionally done every other week. The hardest part has been finding someone, not the decision making involved. I pulled out my woman of the house card. The woman of the house has spoken and so it will be that we will hire someone to replace our dear Lola. We haven't had much luck since Lola moved to Houston. No one else has been able to do as good a job as Lola. No one. Some time ago, I placed some ads on craigslist but DH was worried that we would end up with weirdos. In the meantime, I've been asking around for recommendations and we finally got a recommendation about a house cleaning crew that our friends are happy with.

I'm home to meet with Allie, the rep. Today's their first cleaning and I'm thinking about giving her an orientation to my style of cleaning. It's the start of what I hope would be a long-term relationship. The kind that progresses to the point where trust sets in and I feel okay with leaving my keys for the crew when I'm away. The last person I got from craigslist really didn't do a great job. She did less than basic cleaning in my opinion. I do a better job even at my laziest. The tiles on the kitchen floor were looked like they'd been gone over with water alone and I doubt that she even touched the tiles on the walls of the bathrooms. The last straw was when she left a trash bag in the middle of the living room for invisible man to pick up after her. As desperate as I was to have someone else do the cleaning, she had to go. In retrospect, I realize that the problem there was that I never explained what I needed done and what my expectations were. My friends seem to think it's because she wasn't Latina. They think only Latinas do a thorough cleaning job. That's not true. Anyhow, I hear that Allie's team not only does a great job, they arrange the magazines on your coffee table just like they do in hotels and better than that, they make floral arrangements out of your towels and toilet paper. That's cool but all I want is a clean house.