How to get the most out of maid service in your kitchen
If you’re a little behind on your spring cleaning, there is an alternative to spending an entire weekend scrubbing and dusting. Instead of playing catch-up, let a professional do it for you and hire a maid service. If you’re like many people, you may want to have them focus on the one room in the home that gets used the hardest: the kitchen. Here are a few ways you can get the most bang for your buck when you hire a maid service to get your kitchen sparkling clean.
- Invite them to ignore the living room. You can hire a maid service to spruce up the entire apartment, but if you’re really more worried about the state of the kitchen, ask them to focus there. They can do a more thorough job cleaning your stove and erasing fingerprints from the fridge if there’s more time to spend on these tasks. If you have the maid service returning for weekly or monthly sessions, politely request that they leave the living room, bedroom, and bathroom and just zero in on the kitchen grime for a single session. This will ensure that you get the deepest clean possible in just a single visit.
- Make a list of easy-to-miss spaces. Between the stove and the cabinets, underneath the fridge, behind the microwave. Every kitchen has spots that are particularly difficult to clean. Often this means that they simply don’t get cleaned at all. This might fly when you’re just doing a quick once-over before guests show up for dinner, but every nook and cranny should be carefully de-grimed when you’re hiring someone to help with the work. Make sure that no pot holder is left unturned by jotting down a list of spaces in the kitchen for the maid service employee to clean, particularly spaces that are easy to overlook.
- Keep an eye on how well the job was done. With careful instructions in place, the staffer from your chosen maid service should have no trouble understanding what to do. Afterwards, do a quick spot check to make sure that he or she hit every spot on your list. If not everything was completed up to your standards, it’s worth dropping the company a line to let them know. On the flipside, if the employee went above and beyond to create a pristine, sparkling-clean kitchen, acknowledging this is also important. Either way, the feedback will help the cleaning team serve its future customers even better (which is especially important if those future customers include you).
- Offer an appropriate gratuity. In addition to offering a glowing review on Yelp or via email to an employee’s boss, another way to express your gratitude for a job well done is a good tip. The general rule of thumb for tipping for this type of service is between 10% and 15% of the total fee for the cleaning. However, if you feel as though the effort warrants it, splurge on a 20% tip to let your home cleaner know how much you appreciate their hard work.