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Comment by crispyambulance | Hacker News Reader

$130 twice a month for housekeeping is one expenditure my wife and I will probably never give up as long as we live in a house. There's something so soothing about coming home to a house that is orderly and clean. We use the time boost to spend time in the kitchen, cooking.

I think the only other way to get around this problem is to have a much smaller living space with less stuff. The less stuff you have the easier it is to manage.

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I used a housekeeping service for a few months (Handy). The time saved definitely felt worth the money in general. On the other hand, and this is maybe partly my building's arrangement, it also felt like it complicated/constrained life sometimes. I would find myself saying "sorry, I'll skip drinks, I have to get home and let the maid in at 7pm". I also found it a little hard to be fully relaxed while the person was there in the next room. And, one day while on vacation, although I canceled the cleaning for that week, a maid showed up at my apartment, and they made the trip for nothing - I felt bad. Turned out the site had quickly auto-moved the first canceled appointment to a few days later in a pretty misleading way. I got charged and decided to work it out with their customer service. I just pulled up the chain, and it was a 15 email inquiry that took 35 days to resolve. IIRC, a negative Yelp review got things moving again.

So, that's probably not everyone's situation or experience, but it just reiterated that having control and simplicity is nice. Simplicity for some might be not having to clean, but for others it might mean not having to depend on someone else. I can't be my own Verizon or Uber of course, but some things I'm in a good position to provide for myself...

Restoring order to my own living space provides both soothing busy-work, and reinforces my sense of ownership and control over the space. If someone else cleans it, I will be timid about using the place they have to clean.

It relates to larger ideas of ownership being composed of use approaching limits, maintenance of standards, and defense of boundaries. Maintaining the standards of cleanliness of a living space is part of owning the living space - along with approaching (and expanding) the the living space's limits for use & utility, and defending the boundaries of the living space.

There can be beauty in the simple transaction of fair employment. No exploitation. They come to you, into your home, do a service and you pay them the wage they asked for. I never feel bad about dirtying the house, it's part of the cycle.

If you have lots of foot traffic or little ones, consider getting a robo-vac too. We just got a Neato Botvac D5 and it is great for in-between cleaning vacuum runs. There's something nice about pushing a button and 1:30 later having a vacuumed home without having had to lift a finger (for the most part--still figuring out where it gets stuck).

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