After two years of living in a larger house and cleaning it ourselves, we've finally come to a point where we'd like to consider hiring cleaners. As a frugal person, I feel bad hiring people to do things I can do myself, especially since I don't have a job. Therefore, I've always done my own housework. Besides, for the past 26+ years, I’ve loved the smell of Pine-Sol every time I scrub the toilets.
However, the downside of living in a larger house is that maintaining it can feel overwhelming. And after a while, the uncleanliness and messiness starts to wear on my wife and me. We would much rather be spending our time playing with our kids or watching The Morning Show on Apple TV than clean for four hours.
Yet, like paying someone to detail your car for $300–$500, I can't get over how wasteful that feels. The car will easily get dirty in one or two weeks' time. So as a result, I've also never paid someone to wash or detail my car. I just get a hose and sponge and do it myself for 15–20 minutes. Although the car isn't perfectly clean, it's 80% clean enough!
So in this post, I want to figure out a way to overcome our reluctance in spending ~$450 to deep clean our house. It is a luxury expense and frankly, I feel like a lazy traitor to my finances for considering hiring cleaners. Maybe you have the same dilemma and feel the same way.
The Reluctance To Hire Cleaners To Clean Our House
The first thing I did was gain some perspective on what other people do. And what other people do with regard to hiring cleaners shocked me. Maybe you can pitch in and share what you do as well.
I spoke to a cleaning lady on my walk home the other day. She was cleaning one of my neighbor's houses so I asked her how often she cleans the house. She said she and her crew clean the house every week! Both parents are working professionals with two young kids, and they've had their house cleaned almost every week for the past 13 years.
Holy moly! Could a house really be that dirty and messy after only one week, even with a couple of young kids? If the parents just spent 15 minutes every other day cleaning up, and maybe 30 minutes on the weekends, the house would surely be clean enough, right?
If you care enough to pay for weekly cleaners, surely you care enough to allocate 15 minutes a day to cleaning up. Your tolerance for uncleanliness is low, so you naturally take action.
Why the Guilt Is Real and Why It Matters
For many of us who came up practicing frugality and growing up in a middle class household, hiring help feels like an admission of failure. If you can do it yourself, you should. Doing chores is character-building. Scrubbing the toilet makes us appreciate our wealth and helps us keep our bathrooms cleaner when using.
If you’re a FIRE practitioner, every dollar not saved or invested after covering basic living expenses can feel like a waste. Spending money on things like monthly cleaners can feel especially painful, because it means buying back less of your future time and freedom.
Over time, living in America can make us soft. We have an abundance of food, so we overeat. Our parents give us everything we ask for instead of letting us struggle, so when it’s time to pay back our college loans, we revolt. When we need money, instead of taking a minimum-wage service job, we turn to the Bank of Mom & Dad for another handout.
In Japan, cleaning our own homes is viewed as a sign of respect – for our space, for ourselves, and for others. It’s a reminder that life is always sliding toward disorder, and it’s our responsibility to keep it in check. The last thing I want to do is develop an entitlement mentality, where I start expecting other people to handle all the unglamorous work for me.
But frugality is a tool, not a religion. There comes a point where spending money to buy time and sanity is the rational move. The math isn’t just dollars versus chores, it’s dollars versus hours versus stress versus relationship bandwidth.
The Hidden Costs of Doing It Yourself
- Time: It can take between 1-3 hours for a single professional to clean 1,000 square feet. The larger your home, the more hours or manpower it will take to clean. Those are hours you could spend on work, sleep, exercise, or with your kids.
- Energy: After a long week, cleaning requires energy reserves you may not have. That affects moods and patience. The worse your mood, the less happy your marriage.
- Quality: Professional cleaners with experience and the right tools can deep-clean faster and more effectively.
- Opportunity Cost: What is your time worth? Even if you value it conservatively—$35–$50/hour—regular cleaning quickly pays for itself.
A Practical Spending Framework On Cleaning By Income
I'm always thinking of financial guidelines to follow to optimize our spending. So let's consider how much to spend on cleaners based on household income and net worth. Below is a simple framework I suggest when deciding whether a service is worth outsourcing:
- Monthly cleaning budget ≈ 0.5% – 1% of monthly gross income (scale up with house size and caregiving needs).
- Or think in net worth bands: the higher your net worth, the more you should buy back time vs. doing low-value chores yourself.
Rough guide:
| Household Situation | Annual Income | Suggested Monthly Cleaning Budget |
|---|---|---|
| Frugal / Lean FIRE | <$100K | $0 – $85 |
| Middle Class Households | $100K – $250K | $40 – $200 |
| High-Income Households | $250K – $700K | $100 – $600 |
| Affluent / Top 1% Income Households | $700K – $2 Million | $300 – $1,700 |
Example: If you make $250,000/year (~$20,800/month), a $200 monthly cleaning bill is ~1% of monthly gross. That's within the 0.5–1% guideline if you consider the family-wide value (less fighting, more sleep, more free time).
How Much To Spend On Cleaning Based On Net Worth
If you’re financially independent or FIRE, your net worth may be a better guide than income for deciding how much help to hire.
Here's a simple rule of thumb: Yearly cleaning budget = 0.1% of your net worth
That’s enough to maintain your home and sanity without feeling wasteful. In other words, if you have a $1 million net worth, you have a $1,000 annual cleaning budget.
| Net Worth Level | Lifestyle Description | Suggested Yearly Cleaning Budget | Typical Cleaning Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|
| <$1 million | Still building wealth / FIRE-in-progress | $0 – $1,000 | DIY + semi-annual deep clean |
| $1–$3 million | Lean FIRE / modest comfort | $1,000 – $3,000 | Monthly or quarterly deep clean |
| $3–$5 million | Regular FIRE / upper middle-class comfort | $3,000 – $5,000 | Biweekly or alternating deep clean |
| $5–$10 million | Fat FIRE / lifestyle optimization | $5,000 – $10,000 | Weekly clean or full-service monthly |
| $10M+ | Obese FIRE / efficiency-maximized | $10,000+ | Weekly full-service + organization help + four full body massages + private chef once every two weeks |
If your net worth is high (say $2–5M+), spending $1,000+/month to maintain a large house is often a very efficient use of time. On the other hand, if you’re still building wealth and income is tight, aim for monthly deep cleans + DIY maintenance.
Positives of Hiring Cleaners
- Time back: Instead of scrubbing baseboards, you get family time or productive work hours.
- Mental health: Less clutter = less cognitive load. A tidy space leads to calmer conversations.
- Relationships: Fewer fights about chores equals higher marital returns.
- Professional quality: They hit spots you won’t. Deep cleans, grout, vents — the works.
Negatives of Hiring Cleaners
- Recurring cost: Once you outsource, it becomes a line item that grows.
- Guilt: You might feel you’re buying comfort instead of earning it.
- Security/privacy: There is a chance the cleaners will steal your valuables or sell your home’s layout to a thief. Hence, do proper vetting through an agency and lock your valuables away. One person can also be at home as well to minimize risk.
- Dependency: If the cleaner quits, you’ll have to go back to DIY mode or find new cleaners.
How We’ll Test This New Expense
We’re going to run a simple experiment: a $450 deep clean after 27 months paired with a realistic 5-minute daily tidy routine by everyone in the family. Why the hybrid approach? Because deep cleaning handles the heavy lifting, while the small daily wins keep the house from sliding back into chaos or turning into a Lego minefield by Thursday.
If the $450 deep clean feels worth it, we’ll wait three months and reassess whether we want to do it again. My theory is that a quarterly deep clean is the sweet spot, just enough to maintain order without busting the budget and feeling lazy. At $1,800 a year, that feels like a reasonable price for 12-16 more hours of free time.
Metrics I care about:
- Hours reclaimed per week (track with a simple log).
- Stress levels (my wife and I rate household stress weekly).
- Relationship friction (are we happier or not).
- Net effective cost (time worth saved vs. dollars spent).
Give Deep Cleaning A Try And Cut Back If Desired
We’re going to redefine this expense as investment in family time, in sanity, and in the kind of life we want to lead. If you’re on the fence, run the numbers for your household. Try a short experiment, and decide based on reclaimed hours and reduced friction, not on guilt.
Who knows. You might find hiring cleaners to be the best use of funds ever!
Readers, I’d love to hear about your cleaning routine. Do you hire professional cleaners for your home? If so, how often and how much does it cost? For those who are able-bodied, how do you overcome the guilt of not cleaning your house yourself?
Diligently Track Your Finances
Hiring cleaners is one of those lifestyle upgrades that feels small but quietly compounds. A few hundred dollars a month doesn’t seem like much until you zoom out and realize it can mean tens or hundreds of thousands less in net worth over time if you’re not paying attention.
That’s why I’ve used Empower’s free financial dashboard ever since leaving my day job in 2012. It helps me see, in one place, exactly where my money is going and whether my spending choices actually align with my long-term goals.
If you’re debating whether cleaners are “worth it” at your income or net worth level, start by getting clarity. When you can see your cash flow, investment fees, and net worth trajectory clearly, spending decisions become far less emotional and far more rational.
If you haven’t reviewed your finances in the past 6 to 12 months, now is a great time to do so. You can run a DIY checkup using Empower’s free tools or opt for a complimentary financial review. Either way, you’ll likely uncover opportunities to optimize and free up money for what matters most to you.
Spend intentionally today so you can live freely tomorrow.
Empower is a long-time affiliate partner of Financial Samurai. I’ve personally used their free tools since 2012 to track my net worth, cash flow, and investments. Click here to learn more.
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We cleaned our own home until we had kids. We both work and my rule of thumb was having a cleaner come 1x per month per child. We ended up with 2 kids, so, every other week. With little kids and both adults working, it was necessary to stay sane. That being said, our kids are now teenagers and we moved a year and a half ago to a larger home. We did NOT restart the cleaning people. Surprisingly, it hasn’t been that bad. I’ll say, the house is a little dirtier, but because our housing cost went up so much with the new home, I wanted to cut back on other expenses. As of right now, I don’t plan to add it back for the foreseeable future. The biggest difference is when we had cleaners the whole house was clean at once – like hitting a reset button. Now, the floors get cleaned one day, the sheets another, bathrooms another day, etc. The idea of having someone come in and do a quarterly deep clean does sound appealing! Cleanmama.com is a good website for pacing yourself with DIY house cleaning.
15 minutes every other day and 30 minutes on the weekend? Your house must be super dirty if you think that would be enough time to spend cleaning it LOL. Definitely don’t want to visit your house lol. Sounds like you need to watch some YouTube videos on house cleaning. I recommend the channel clean that up. I have a 708 square foot apartment and it takes me 4 hours each Saturday and of course I keep it tidy during the work week. Tip, the Swiffer duster is life-changing. Also, if you have tile, the duprey steam cleaner is also life-changing.
Don’t worry Cynthia, you’re not invited :)
I love that you spend four hours every Saturday cleaning a 708 ft.² apartment. Personally, I’d rather be spending time with the kids after playing tennis or Pickleball in the morning.
To each their own!
A cleaner is worth it if it’s in the budget, it will be the first thing I do when I win the 1.6 billion Powerball (just leveraged my house to buy tix, I should be good).
On a smaller scale, I’ve started taking toll roads for $2-3 which saves me 20-30 minutes of driving and I don’t know why I didn’t start doing this earlier. Getting a cleaner will probably feel similar.
Haha, awesome! Don’t forget to at least Venmo me at least $1 million. Chump change for someone with still $800 million after tax.
I still can’t get myself to pay the toll to get somewhere faster by five minutes. I’m happy to just drive the speed limit or lower.
We have always done the house cleaning. We also do the lawn and pool care as well as most of the maintenance on the house. Now that we are in Obese Fire we still do it. I find the yard work relaxing and we just cleaned all the bathrooms yesterday.
My wife and I have had a biweekly house cleaner for 25 years. Frankly, it is required in our marriage.
I hear you on that. Are both of you working full time?
We did all our own cleaning until we had a newborn and a 2 year old. Cleaning felt overwhelming at that point with work too. We got a weekly, trustworthy housekeeper (same person) who comes about 4 hrs / week to clean, do laundry ect for $150 / week for a 1000sq ft apartment in NYC. Now that my kids are 4 and 6, I was just thinking we don’t need so much help and switching to bi-weekly. For us, we try to eat home cooked, nutritious meals every weeknight, so cooking and dishes seems to take about 1-1.5hrs total every night, and weekends we aren’t home much. How much time (or money) does everyone else spend on the dinner routine?
Getting help when the kids are just born and the first 3 years is huge. It’s money well spent as you get maximum return. Bi-weekly sounds like a good way for your family to save $300/month. Use it to fund your kid’s custodial investment accounts. It’ll feel great!
We used to pay up big for food delivery and takeout since COVID 2020, to the tune of $1,500+ a month I think. It saved us time, cleanup, and helped with at least feeling like we’d reduce the risk of getting sick, especially with a newborn.
But the food definitely isn’t as healthy as home cooking. So we’ve cut it down by 50%-60%.
Your West Side neighbor here (St. Francis Wood). We can recommend excellent cleaners, a Ukrainian couple, who are extremely thorough, diligent, and attentive to our instructions. They come every two weeks, $250 for 2,300ft house.
Sounds good! Thx. Will reach out if we want to try new cleaners. Sounds like they will charge us $400-$450 based on house size, which is inline.
How do you enjoy SFW? I drive through all the time.
Didn’t have cleaners growing up and had my first cleaner when I had kids. Now we’re in the $3M+ crowd and I run my own cleaning company so my perk is getting it at cost. Even then I prefer monthly and keep it tidy in between. I have a checklist for the kids and they do they part for maintenance.
Part of my hiring process is to test new potential cleaners in looking to hire in my home so we get extra cleans too.
No different than hiring lawn service. We have a cleaner that comes in bi-weekly. $165 per. Wife loves it. Specifically from a time allocation. Cleaner needs 4-5 hours to clean. Would take my wife and I an entire day to accomplish the same. My time is presious. Important to vet. Well worth it.
I’m definitely in the <$1M crowd and grew up in a frugal household. I hired a house cleaner only once in my life: After some minor renovation work finished in my new condo. I just mentally put the cost in my closing cost bucket and made peace.
And then there is the move-out cleaner who takes deep cleaning to another level. After we moved out and before our realtor would stage and list the old townhouse, she brought in her move-out cleaner who spent multiple days scrubbing to the standard of new. Yes, it was expensive. And so worth it. Once we listed, a buyer appeared with a 98% full price offer within a week and the deal closed quickly. We had hired individual cleaners and had used a cleaning service over the years but I had never seen such immaculate cleaning as the move-out cleaner provided. Now we hired a new cleaner who comes every other week. I’m retired and have time and strength to do the cleaning myself but I don’t want to. We can afford it.
Yes! I experienced the same thing when my previous tenants hired move out Cleaners. And then they hired Carpet cleaners that made the carpets look like new with their wet cleaning and chemicals. It was amazing! Saved me from spending at least $3000 to replace the carpet.
Sam,
We feel similarly about the use of a cleaning service. Getting one deep clean a month is very freeing mentally. It’s nice to go into events (like Christmas or Thanksgiving) with a refreshed house without needing to add that to the already big prep list. We still take care of daily clean up and straightening. If something that’s not as clean as we like it is bothering us, we clean it ourselves to keep our home feeling fresh. We pay about $200 monthly for the deep cleaning.
Thanks for the article.
One of my points of reluctance with cleaners is that they damage things. Good luck finding a cleaner that cares about your belongings – they just want to get in and out as quickly as possible and if that means banging the vacuum into the walls or dropping some things so be it. Also, in addition to some prep putting things away so they don’t get damaged, we spend quite some time putting things back to where they belong because things always end up in a different place after the cleaners show up. I have also resorted to giving written instructions not to touch the art on our walls, leave my desk completely alone, etc.
The biggest consideration for me was physical health. How much would you pay to minimize the illnesses from daycare and school that your kids bring home? It takes a kid under 10 about 5 minutes to spread germs from any one room of the house to every other room of the house. If I do the cleaning myself, it’s bathrooms on one week and kitchen the next, so the germs are less but never gone. Hiring cleaners gets the whole house clean at once, absolutely worth it! We do a cleaning once every 4 weeks. It’s also a balance, my family would rather do our own yard work than clean the house, so that’s what we do.
Fascinating perspective! I never thought about it.
But isn’t it kind of luck of the draw? Since it takes several days for illnesses to incubate and spread, you would have to have the cleaners come before the spread and before the sick kid contaminates the other room that you may or may not be in. And for the cleaners to kill the germs.
So unless the cleaning is everyday by a professional while they’re in school, I feel that the prevention of the spread of germs is hopeless. But I do see the potential benefit!
How often do your cleaners come a month?
Once every 4 weeks. It doesn’t prevent every illness for sure, but I do think it’s helped keep us all a little bit healthier.
This is something my wife and I struggle with. We certainly can make the time to clean, but it is usually an all-day effort or multi-day effort between both of us to make it happen.
We had a very good housecleaner, but they were flaky and sometimes would forget or come on the wrong day, so finally we said enough was enough and went back to the drawing board.
And weirdly, as I get older, I take more pride in actually cleaning. I pop in a podcast and use it as a time to not only get a little workout in (cleaning is hard), but also for learning.
So while I certainly hope we find a good housecleaner again at some point, right now I am not hating it.
We previously had cleaners come every two weeks. Since my partner and I have recently reduced our work shifts and are home more often, we are now doing more of the cleaning ourselves. Our children, ages 11 and 9, have folded their own laundry for years, I make them clean their own dishes, and more recently I have introduced them to the vacuum cleaner. I can’t wait to show them a toilet brush and sponge!
Thanks for sharing. Been thinking about this myself this year… while the monthly cost seems like a good value to reclaim hours of time and reduce stress, I haven’t been able to overcome the annual sum that goes into the thousands. Like you said, growing up poor and frugal mindset really make it hard to spend on something like this even when you could technically afford it by most metrics
As a side note, would love to hear how you guys assess stress levels on a weekly basis, and marital friction
If I tried to eliminate the cleaners due to cost it would cause great marital friction. I am the frugal one in our marriage. My wife has taught me the value of spending sensibly. We are both working. If one or both of you are not working then I am sure it changes the equation.
But I don’t put it in the same category as “splurge” – like flying business instead of economy. IT is “work” of we wouldn’t pay others to do it. So you are paying for a service like any other.
I also have found most of our cleaners are minorities and I like providing work and income for those who probably need it more than me. Not saying I look at it as charity, but on some level I guess it is.
After having my son over a year ago the deep cleaning to my standards was lost. My husband and I were also sleep deprived and tired since we both work and don’t have a lot of help so we decided to get monthly cleaners for the first 6months and now that we have our bearings a bit more we have reduced it to quarterly cleaning. This also forces us to declutter our home and find improvements. I think it’s well worth it but also only if you can afford it. It is definitely a luxury not a necessity.
Hi, Sam
Love your post—and every post. Thank you for sharing!
I’ve had a housekeeper cleaning my home for years, but recently I purchased the Roborock QV35A vacuum and mop, and it has been a great help—especially for keeping the floors clean. I absolutely love walking barefoot on a freshly cleaned floor.
Because of this, I’ve reduced how often I ask the house cleaner to come. Now, when the ladies are here, I usually focus on decluttering. It’s so satisfying to see the house suddenly look like a hotel. Keeping important items put away also improves safety and makes everything feel less burdensome.
It’s definitely worth the money—maybe you’d like to consider investing in a Roborock.
Ok, will check out the Roborock!
“ It’s so satisfying to see the house suddenly look like a hotel.”
Totally agree!
We have biweekly deep cleaning at $200 per. So we roughly spend 5000-6000 a year. Three people come in and hit everything in our 3.5 bath, 5 bedroom house in 2-3 hours.
We make 800k and have 10M NW. Falls about in the lower part of the ranges you note above.
It is a “lifestyle” nobrainer for us. Not only do we not spend a dime or hour on cleaning, but the smell and feel alone after coming home the day they cleaned is priceless.
Only problem is in 2-3 years will be retired and less income so do we continue? Can’t imagine not, but we may cut back to once per month.
We hire 3 cleaners every 2 weeks. It costs us $175.00 plus a $25 tip. They clean for 2 hours. One thing I wasn’t prepared for is that we have to clean our house before they get there. They don’t do dishes or laundry so we have to make sure everything is picked up and put away before they come. They mop all the hardwoods, vacuum , countertops, toilets ,sinks, showers, dust and the windows every so often. We also leave clean sheets out and they make the beds. The majority of my friends use them as well and nothing has ever gone missing from anyone. We have used them for the last 3 years and are quite satisfied.
The only con we have is leaving the house for 2 hours while they clean whether we have something to do or not. We stayed at home the first couple times but it felt really weird doing nothing while they are working .
This is exactly what we have and the scope that our cleaners perform. We joke about “time to clean for the cleaners” the night before. But that is really just straightening the clutter and putting out sheets. What I like is we can navigate the price based on rooms too. Our entire house is $200, but we have a finished basement we rarely use and we can remove that and they drop it to 175.
I have never been fearful of getting stuff stolen, but maybe I should be? I can’t imagine a more dumb move by the cleaners. And we use a large company, which I think it probably safer as not a worse business plan and hiring cleaners who steal… But I guess thieves are by nature sometimes not the brightest. I’ve even had alot of cash laying out on my home office desk when they were there and never was it touched. Maybe they thought I was testing them…:)
Good cash test!
This is quite an interesting topic as the approach can vary so much by uncle, upbringing, home size, family size, and lifestyle habits. I didn’t grow up with any house cleaners coming to my home. I liked to have a clean space and was good at keeping things tidy. Moving in with a significant other and eventual spouse took some adjusting but luckily nothing extreme. But once kids came into my life, that turned everything completely upside down. I lost so much control. And suddenly I was fighting losing battle every single day and still do to this day.
Five minutes a day is better than nothing. But in reality with a four person household it’s going to take at least 15-30 minutes a day easily to try and stay on top of dishes, laundry, bathrooms, entry ways, dust, dirt, etc.I could easily spend 2 hours a day every day and not keep the house clean the way I want to. It’s mentally taxing but I’ve learned to live with more mess than I prefer and to just let things go. Laundry sits unfolded for five days sometimes and dishes pile up for three to four days and I just have to block it out of my mind until I have time to get to it. I ask the kids to help but it’s an uphill battle especially with one of them. So it’s a work in progress and something I should continue to push but try different techniques to make it feel more like play and less like chores.
You are neglecting one important issue. Explaining to woke adult kids why consenting adults can agree to exchange money for housekeeping services.
What are your thoughts on this?
Most kids living at home are not adults yet.
Thx
Hi Sam – can you please talk more about the security aspect? I know people who have had things stolen by cleaners. Worse, I know an elderly couple who was assaulted and robbed by associates of a cleaner. I realize these are rare events and that most folks are good and hard-working, but how do you vet people?
Just have to vet and hope for the best. One person can also be at home as well to minimize risk. The more valuables you have, the more you must vet. We have nothing valuable except for pictures and some collectibles.
How long have you been cleaning your house for without help and when do you think you’ll ever hire help?
I never thought of cleaning as related to income or net worth. This topic is perhaps the biggest challenge for my marriage. A few years ago I stopped our housecleaner that we had 2x per month because I felt our 3 kids (now 15,13,13) should be taking care of their own house. I know, pretty idealistic but as you pointed out I feel this should be a source of pride and ownership and kids should learn to care for their possessions and their surroundings. All that has really happened is my wife and I spend ALOT of time nagging them and they do a pretty poor job. While I still want to continue these lessons, I really like your thought of quarterly deep cleans, I never even thought of that. The thing I didn’t like about house cleaners in the past is they’ve always done an average job and they never really deep clean. I don’t need to hire someone to wipe down my kitchen counters, we really need that deep, very time consuming clean. Thanks Sam, I’m gonna look into this, I consider it an investment in my marriage and relationship with the kids.
Thanks for giving me a glimpse at raising teenagers!
I wonder, if they see you and your wife getting down and cleaning the floors and shower pan, etc., would they feel like they can’t help but get down and clean as well? Or as teenagers, they’ve simply got their own ideas?
I’ve been doing a lot of landscaping work with them at our rental properties by getting down and dirty. As a result, they do as well. But I wonder when that will change, if ever.
Yes, my wife and I do the heavy cleaning but they are in no way motivated to jump in and help. It’s usually us nagging them to help. I remember your article about the kids helping you at your rentals; you gave me the idea to have my kids help to clean our rentals prior to a new move in. It’s usually pretty easy since it is vacant and I pay them $15-$20 per hour to do so, and usually go to Chipotle or Subway after. They seem to be more interested when money and food are involved!
Ugh, kids and cleaning are tough. We got rid of our housekeeper in part to make our kids have more chores. We have settled on they clean their bathroom, the guest half bath and their bedrooms.
It took several months, twice a month, to get them to be able to clean well. Lots of frustration all around. They started doing it without complaint after we told them they are doing it no matter what but if they don’t have a good attitude, we are taking away their allowance.
One compromise that I loved was a friend who had the main floor (including their bedroom) cleaned every other week, but the upstairs (with the kids room and bathroom) cleaned once a month. The kids had to clean it once a month but it made sure that it got super clean regularly.