San Diego House Cleaning (V) – the Cost of Janitorial Home Services

I bet that most of you folks who are thinking about hiring a maid or a professional janitorial home cleaning service are wondering, “How much should I pay them” or “How much is cleaning my house going to cost”? Well, there are some simple things that need to be taken into consideration when you want to find the answer to this question. Instead of offering you the exact prices (which are useless because most services charge differently) I’m going to publish a list of things that matters the most when talking about the cost that you are about to pay for a professional house cleaning. I understand that the cost of janitorial home services is the most important factor that determines if you’ll be able to support that maid (financially) or not, but I would like to say that it’s not always the most determinant one. Your time (as I realized when living in San Diego) is what matters the most. Money can be made back in thousands of different ways. However, our time is the most expensive because we have only one life to live (well at least as we know it) and no one can get it back to us, even for all the riches of this world. That’s why the real cost of janitorial services that could and need to clean your home should be always seen through the prism of how valuable your time really is. Do you understand what I am talking about here? I hope you do.

The second most important thing that concerns people who are trying to hire a cleaning service (besides money) is the quality and professionalism of the team or the contractor (if talking about one person). While in most of the cases selecting a house cleaning service is not easy, we already showed you how to do it in a previous article. Make sure that you attentively read it. OK, let’s get back to the cost and the price that you are about to be required to pay when you want to outsource the whole cleaning work that your household needs to be exposed to periodically. It’s a well known fact that many people are actually shocked when they are told the final sum of monies that they need to pay for the janitorial home services that they ordered. However, the thing is that they all make a huge mistake of not talking throughout the contract before signing in. Remember that a good quality house cleaning service is always going to charge good money for their services, especially if they claim to be one of the most professional ones on the scene. While in most of the cases people are guilty for not speaking with the manager of the company about the price, sometimes it can be also hard to find out the exact numbers and they claim that it always depends on the amount of work, the necessary time frame and the difficulty of cleaning.

Before planning to hire a janitorial cleaning service in San Diego and finding not only a professional maid that knew how to clean a house, but a friend as well, I had to realize that prices that most companies charge vary a lot. Obtaining exact numbers is only possible during various offers and actions that they promote from time to time when you’ll be able to find a team that cleans your house in several hours for $500 USD for example no matter how much work is there to do. If you stumble upon a local service that just launched and is trying to accumulate as many new clients as possible, than I guess something like this is real. However, in all the other situations it is not. Before I actually had a serious talk with the maid that worked in my San Diego house for approximately 2 years, I did not have any clue how do they charge you when you request help from janitorial services and why do the prices differ so much. Margareta, my maid, explained to me, during one of the first discussions about house cleaning that we had, when I was just starting to explain here how important is living in a perfectly clean home for me and why I wanted someone who I can trust to do this work, every day from now on. (After a while Margareta quitted her previous job and start to work for me)

The amount of work required
When you plan to hire someone to do the cleaning work for you, they are first going to ask about the amount of work required for cleaning your house. If there is nothing serious to do and they can handle it in less than several hours, you aren’t going to be charged really much. However, it all depends on your house after all. If your place is a partially clean kept house than you won’t need to pay a lot and basically I don’t see the reason why you should be outsourcing this kind of work after all. If you can keep your house clean on your own you should continue to do it yourself unless you discovered that you are going to need more time in whatever you do around your house. Alright so let’s get back to the cost that you’ll be asked to pay when the lady determines what things should be taking into consideration. Some of the aspects that you’ll be told about can be quite strange, but in the end it’s all about finding someone who can deal with your house cleaning so that you could have more free time and dedicate it either to your family or concentrate more and your business or work. Nevertheless, the first and the most often mentioned factor is the amount of work required aka the volume of work. How big your house really is comes next.

The size of your apartment/house/palace
No matter what most of the people think, the size really matters:). Janitorial services are always going to charge you based on the size of your place measures in square feet. Don’t forget to make the math on your own before calling them because sometimes you can even be short of the money you are about to pay in cash. Anyway, it’s important to know how many rooms you have, the sq ft of each and which of them needs to be professional cleaned, how often and when. Night janitorial services are much more expensive than day time ones because people who clean either your house or office should work instead of sleeping just like normal ordinary people. Do you understand what I am talking about here? The maid that you’ll hire will have more work to do in a bigger house and fast cleaning is not possible in case we are dealing with five floors palace with 100 square feet rooms. In this case you’ll be dealing with a more difficult cleaning and I would suggest hiring a whole team of janitors instead of a single nice lady to take care of everything. When the total estimation is put together, the size of each particular room and the amount of work required is going to be attentively calculated and taken into consideration. Those who want to obtain a more accurate price of the janitorial home service that they hire need to have the information related to the overall size of their house before letting the team in. Do you understand?

The difficulty of the job
Besides the general size of the house, there is some other aspect that plays a very important role in the estimate of the necessary cost that a client is charged when cleaning the house. It’s all about who lives in that place and whenever those people have any pets or kids. If you are grown up you probably understand that a house with plenty of pets is going to require a more attentive and profound work to be done and the same applies when talking about small kids playing around all day long and turning everything upside down. So it’s your duty to understand that what and who is in that place also matters a lot. If you ordered professional cleaned floors but you have original unique cherry, big and hard to move furniture, than they are going to experience some problems while trying to get the hard floors underneath perfectly cleaned. If we talk about dusting as well and getting rid of it, no matter what method is going to be used, than we talk about plenty of work as well. The more objects, furniture, appliances, computers, TVs, etc you have in and round your house the more work is going to be required and of course the higher the general cost is going to be. A house with more than one level usually have stairs, which are also a pain to clean if you ever tried it yourself. The stairs cleaning in my San Diego house took me approximately one hour each and every week to clean. So, the “higher” the palace is, the higher the price will go. Cleaning the floors is also very important and matters a lot, because each individual type of flooring requires a special attitude. The janitors or maids have no problem vacuuming the carpets. However, when it comes to hardwood floors or vinyl ones, they don’t really like it because special knowledge of using certain substances only is required and takes a longer time to do. And as time is money, more time equals more money out of your pocket.

Besides all the above mentioned factors, the frequency of the work itself is going to matter a lot. You can pay the lady who does the job as soon as the work is finished or you can send monthly checks and payments if you decided that this is going to be necessary to be done on a regular basis. It’s all up to you. So when you put all those mentioned factors together you can have the approximate price that a janitorial home cleaning service or the lady that works for them will charge you. There is no reason to worry since in most of the cases, being able to save your precious time doing something else and maybe earning more money will appear to be even more cost effective than cleaning your house or office on your own. Take your time and think about it. I did it on my own and I am one of the happiest people in the world for being able to offer more time for my family and work. Outsourcing your house cleaning duty to other professional cleaners is great.

I remember that after hiring a maid from janitorial company back in San Diego I had 10x times more free time than ever before. Even if it might seem a little bit expensive at the beginning, it pays off in the long run and I’m sure that most of you won’t necessarily understand that from the very first attempt. While finding the price will give you a headache at the beginning, you shouldn’t pay attention only to the cost itself. The quality of the work is what matters most and in case they do their work professional and no supervising is necessary you’ve found yourself a good deal that is probably worth the money they ask you to pay.

Eveline
San Diego Home Cleaning Blog