Dad’s House

A few weeks ago I fired my cleaning lady, Julia. Maybe not the brightest thing for a single dad to do, especially with a teenage girl and pre-teen boy in the house. But Julia had expanded her business (thanks in part to referrals by me) and no longer personally cared for our home.

The new workers did a decent enough job, but we suddenly couldn’t find our stuff – school textbooks, favorite T-shirts, toys, iPods, soccer cleats – all missing. Nothing stolen, just hard to find. Seems we’d grown accustomed to Julia knowing exactly who a thing belonged to and where it went. And we weren’t at all prepared for the new cleaners’ approach, which focused on piling.

They put our stuff into piles – piles of books, piles of clothes, piles of paper. They moved piles, combined piles, straightened piles, piled piles into brown bags and hid them away. It was maddening.

Okay, so maybe we shouldn’t have strewn our stuff all over the house, begging to be piled. We caught on at some point, and started tidying up before they came. It wasn’t easy. Nights before cleaning day became frantic events. “The cleaners are coming. Anything left out is fair game!” We’d dash crazily around the house collecting our most important things, stashing them in cupboards and drawers where we could find them later, tiny piles secretly cached.

“Why do we have a cleaning lady if we do all the cleaning?” my eleven-year-old son asked.

Good question, it did seem like we were doing a lot of housework. But the cleaners scrubbed the bathrooms, scoured the kitchen, vacuumed the rugs, mopped the floors.

“We can do all that,” my fifteen-year-old daughter offered.

Yeah, right. Three years into my divorce, aghast at the mold farm that passed for my shower, my girlfriend threatened to stop seeing me unless I hired someone to clean the house. Enter Julia, and five years of spic-and-span living.

“I’m not sure we’ll do a good enough job,” I said.
“We’re older now,” my daughter said. “And we need to learn how to clean for when we’re in college, and on our own.”

Good point. But of course there was a catch.

“Just pay us what you would have paid Julia.”

I agreed to pay half. We divided the chores and assigned salaries - $8 for bathrooms, $5 for dusting, $2 for changing sheets. My son jumped on the chance to vacuum rugs and Swiffer the floors the first week ($4 and $5 jobs). That was fine, I was glad he was eager to help. I opted for kitchen and bathrooms, and my daughter was left to dust and clean furniture. But first, we needed cleaning supplies.

I’d scrutinized Julia’s cleaning bucket well enough that I knew what to buy – dusters, sponges, disinfecting bathroom cleaner, antibacterial kitchen cleaner, glass cleaner, calcium- and lime-stain remover for the shower door. Target had everything we needed laid out in a few aisles. I even found a blue two-compartment plastic bucket like Julia used to caddy supplies. But where was the Swiffer?

I found brooms, dust mops, damp mops, sponge mops, steam mops, power mops, cordless mops, all-in-one vacuum and mops. But no Swiffer. (For the uninitiated, a Swiffer is a mop with disposal cloths that trap and lock dirt and dust rather than pushing it around.)

Could I go with something more traditional? My gut told me, no. The kids swore nothing got hardwood floors clean like a Swiffer. The local newspaper, in a recent Shape Up The House! article had listed Swiffer by product name. Even Julia used a Swiffer. How could Target not carry this all-important cleaning device? And how could I face my eager-to-Swiffer son with an ordinary broom?

I must have stood in the mop aisle for a good ten minutes before I grabbed an O-Cedar and trudged toward checkout at the front of the store. I ducked down one last aisle looking for Pinesol, an old-school cleaner my parents had used on their floors, when I came across five entire shelves of Swiffer refill cloths. Dry cloths, damp cloths, scented clothes. The Swiffer mother lode!

As I regarded, even admired, my options, a few customers came down the aisle and selected Swiffer products with practiced efficiency. “Are these good?” I asked a middle-aged mom with two toddlers in tow. She looked me over with uneasy eyes, a devoted Swiffer user wary of anyone who might question the product’s goodness. Then she softened, perhaps seeing me for the cleaning virgin I was. I might as well have asked if manna came from heaven. “Oh, yeah,” she said.

(Another note for the uninitiated: the Swiffer mop handle telescopes and compacts to fit in a small box when sold. Which is why I couldn’t find it with the other brooms and mops, those long-handled dinosaurs.)

The kids were suitably impressed with the supplies, and especially liked the blue two-compartment plastic caddy. We felt like real house cleaners. My son dry-Swiffered and damp-Swiffered and vacuumed, and even sprayed down the shower mold (negotiating for half of the $8 bathroom cleaning salary.) Of course, things didn’t go exactly as planned. A heavy homework load kept my daughter from doing more than a light dusting, and the mess (piles!) in her room prevented my son from vacuuming her rug. But all in all, we did a pretty good job, giving me hope we can keep the house clean on our own.

For the record, my daughter earned $6 the first week, and my son earned $17. About half what I would have paid Julia for the same work, but more than 80% as clean.

As I counted out dollar bills to pay the kids, my son beamed. “So this is what it’s like to make more money than my sister!”

I get the feeling cleaning our own house is going to be a very good thing.

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