House Cleaners During Remodel

[ny96]

We are about to start our remodel and it has occurred to me that we have a weekly housecleaner that we have to figure out timing on. She comes every Tuesday and stays for about 5 hours. At this point we have a number of different work teams lined up to do various jobs in succession so they’ll all be different teams, coming at different times. We love our house cleaner. She is also our on call babysitter and we don’t want to do anything to put her off. Her schedule is pretty busy and so I’m not sure she could work around our construction schedule, at the same time as generous as I want to be, I don’t want to just continue paying her without getting my house cleaned (it’s fine as a one off thing, but not week after week). What do I do?

[Susie]

We've always had cleaners come as usual, and if there are areas they can't clean because they're under construction I have them do other things to fill any remaining time. Oh, can't clean the bathroom because it's being reno'ed? Please vacuum the basement ceiling cobwebs, or wipe down these windows instead.

[dancingirl21]

I’ve had the same cleaner for 9 years. She’s wonderful and I was in the same position when we did our first floor renovation.

I have her come every 2 weeks. During that time I still had her clean areas that were very accessible - our entire upstairs and our finished basement. There was one time where I cancelled her entirely because she wouldn’t have been able to do much with the number of things going on.

I also asked her what she preferred. During the busy time, she was fine with skipping us for a 2 week period.

[simpsongal]

I rescheduled my cleaners from time to time, but that doesn't seem like an option. I'd talk to yours to see what she would like to do. We didn't have them clean extra when areas were off limits b/c of construction. I figured they had a harder job w/all the construction dust.