NEAT FREAK THROWS IN THE TOWEL,

TRIES TO HIRE HOUSECLEANERS

I fired the housekeepers.

For years I've complained about the difficulty of keeping up with house cleaning, weary of trying to find time for dusting shelves and scrubbing toilets amid long work commutes and a whirlwind of weekend activities. My mom would call on weekends to chat and find me in the middle of rushing from one household chore to the next. "You need to hire a cleaning service!" she'd say in that worried/exasperated tone she saves just for me.

For a long time I laughed it off: Where I grew up people didn't hire maids, they were the maids. (In fact, my first job at age eight was dusting the home of an elderly neighbor once a week for $5 a pop.) My husband comes from a similar background and felt hiring a maid might seem a little pretentious -- after all, no one in our neighborhood seems to employ one.

Some of my friends now use house cleaners, but I still felt uncomfortable with the idea of having a stranger clean my house. There's something revealing in the mess a family makes of its home. What, for example, does the Superfund site that is my home office say about my work habits? Our dog Butch can't eat a bowl of food without first upending its contents all over the kitchen floor -- what does that say about how we trained him?

Home office aside, I'm a bit of a neat freak, so I wondered whether a cleaning service would do as thorough a job as I would. Or whether they'd do it better. And in an odd way I felt paying someone to clean my home was surrendering to defeat in my effort to successfully juggle family and a full-time job -- outsourcing housecleaning would be admitting that I really can't do it all.

I don't do all the cleaning myself: My husband Gerry is also a neat freak and does his fair share around the house: doing the laundry, unloading the dishwasher, taking out the garbage. (His obsession with vacuuming the rugs even worries me a bit.) Our son Gerald also helps out, making his own bed and putting his toys away. Still, I feel like our house is always in need of a good cleaning.

One Saturday afternoon in July, as I tackled some serious mold buildup on our shower door, I finally decided to throw in the towel -- literally. I'd let things go for too long, as cleaning the bathrooms was taking a frustratingly long time. The bathroom is the household chore I dread most, and a regular cleaning by a housekeeper would free me of it, not to mention saving me time and guilt: As I toiled with the shower door, Gerald kept stopping by to remind me I'd promised to take him bike riding.

Gerry and I talked it over and decided to hire someone to clean every other week. We could easily keep up with straightening the house during the week, but it was the "spring cleaning" chores -- wiping down cabinets, cleaning out the refrigerator, and so forth -- that needed attention.

Our first decision: choose a house-cleaning service or hire an independent contractor.

A cleaning service in our area costs about the same as hiring an individual contractor. We'd be charged between $82 and $87 a visit; friends of ours pay their housekeeper about $80. That $87 is not a flat fee. Cleaning services typically charge based on many factors, including the size of your home, number of bathrooms, and whether you have pets.

But there's a much-steeper cost my friends must pay when hiring someone to work in their home: nanny taxes. By law if you pay a housekeeper or anyone employed to work in your home more than $1,500 a year, you must pay Social Security, Medicare, state and federal unemployment taxes and federal and state income taxes. Breedlove and Associates, an Austin, Texas, company that handles paperwork-filing services for clients with household workers, has a calculator that can help you figure out how much you'll pay. To pay these taxes, you'll need to file IRS Form SS-4 to get an employer identification number. You'll also need to file IRS Schedule H and provide your nanny with a W-2 form each year. (For details, see IRS Publication 926, "Household Employer's Tax Guide.")

Sure, there are companies (including Breedlove) that will do the work for you -- fees range from $36 to $55 a month. But outsourcing that on top of the cleaning would boost our costs from $160 a month for two visits from a cleaning service to $270 a month to hire an employee to work twice a month and hire a service to handle all of the paperwork.

Another option: pay a house cleaner under the table. When I wrote about my friends' Jim and Judy's plan to hire a nanny back in July, a number of readers responded that it was hard to find and keep good help unless they agreed to not pay taxes and report the income of their household workers. Some had hired illegal immigrants, while others said that if they paid the taxes they couldn't offer a competitive salary compared to families who paid their nannies off the books. While I can understand their motives, that course of action just isn't for us. (Sue Shellenbarger also offers some good reasons for paying the nanny tax).

The extra costs didn't seem worth the tradeoff, so we decided to hire a cleaning service. By going with a service we'd also avoid having to do such things as checking individual references -- the services we interviewed said they performed thorough background checks. Finally, as a newcomer to the idea of having a housekeeper, I liked the idea of dealing with a company rather than with the individual doing the cleaning: That would make things easier if we were ever unhappy with the service provided or worse, suspected the cleaner of theft.

I interviewed two companies, one a national chain and the other a local service, and found they both offered similar services and restrictions. Friends of our recommended the national chain, so I called two of its references and liked what I heard: "A good, thorough cleaning job." "Polite, friendly workers." The service was also bonded and insured, which would protect us if someone got hurt working in our home.

So we chose the national chain. I scheduled the first visit on a day I'd be home so I could watch the cleaners in action. I was impressed by how methodically the two workers took to the task at hand -- they each started in a different room and swept, straightened and scrubbed until that room was finished. It was so unlike the disorganized way I clean my home, moving from room to room and sometimes forgetting the original task in the process. (While straightening up Gerald's room, I'd pick up a wet towel and head for the bathroom to hang it up, only to notice the messy vanity and start cleaning it, abandoning Gerald's room in the process.) I realized my way of cleaning was wasting a lot of time.

After about an hour and a half the young ladies were finished and asked that I inspect their work. The rooms were immaculate and bathrooms gleamed. Worth every penny of that $87, I thought.

But as the weeks went by I began to notice the workers were getting sloppy in their cleaning -- one week they missed our half-bath entirely. I jotted down my concerns and contacted the service manager, who dutifully sent the workers out the next day to address the problems. Soon, though, the cycle would start again and the workers would start to slack off. The streaks on the countertops and floors would irk me and I'd end up pulling out my cleaning supplies and going over their work myself. Last month, I decided I'd had enough and called to cancel the service. The manager tried hard to keep my business, but by then I'd decided that the $87 a visit came with an additional cost -- the aggravation of having to continually complain about shoddy work, and the hassle of redoing that work myself.

Friends of mine who have their own housekeepers tell me my experience isn't common -- one in particular raves that his housekeeper does such a thorough job that "you could eat off my toilet." (Yuck.) But feeling burned by my first experience has me wary of trying a different service. For now, it's back to the drudgery of cleaning the house ourselves.

But the dust bunnies haven't won. From watching the house cleaners I've become much more efficient in how I clean, and I've encouraged Gerry and Gerald to adopt the same "clean as you go" habits that prevent dishes, clothes and toys from cluttering up the house. We're devoting less time to housekeeping each weekend, and saving $160 a month in the process.

-- November 27, 2006

By Terri Cullen

The Wall Street Journal Online