Well the basics of the job should be pretty much the same but I promise you if you looked at my working day & compared it to someone cleaning in a city or a big town it would be very different.
I am part of a few groups & forums for cleaners and some of the things that get written on there really do make me smile!! One person asked – “one of my clients always comes home before I finish and walks wet foot prints across the hall, it dries but always annoys me!”
Wet foot prints …. I have half of the beautiful Shropshire countryside, mud, hay, straw you name it walked into my customers homes!!
Another asked “I only have one client with a dog & they won’t put the dog in its crate while I’m there, his hairs always end up back on the carpet before I’ve left” This one did make me giggle.
A lot of my clients have a dog or a cat, lets be honest like most homes the animals are in charge of the home, you are cleaning for them not the humans. When I first started cleaning (this is really bad!) I could always remember the dog or cats name over the actual customer, I’d always walk in say “Hi Rosie” to the dog and just say Hi to the customer!
Reading the comments on these groups, I feel there is a standard that cleaners in cities expect homes to be left at, where as I just deal with whatever is in front of me. I clean for farmers who pop back in their muddy boots & overalls for lunch! Horse owners, with rugs and tack laid out on the dinning room floor.
Then there are the gardeners, some of the homes I go to have the most impressive gardens, with pots of seeds growing in every window sill ready to go out in the summer sun.
Finally, a comment I see a lot is about travel, how far would people travel between clients some of the answers again make me smile, most of them wouldn’t get more than 2 customers in rural areas. This is probably the downside to being a rural cleaner, but I do get to see some stunning locations!
So a rural cleaner cleans just like a city cleaner does but a rural cleaner is quite often employed by the dog or the cat!! Some homes you are there to make an already perfect home immaculate, some times you are just there to help out in some ones already chaotic world.
And Mud that’s just a normal every day clean up!