Cleaning House: Do We Really Have to Do It?

Jeff Opdyke always thought paying for a housekeeper was an off-limits expense, but now wonders if domestic help is an unnecessary luxury or a modern necessity.
By: Jeff Opdyke: The Wall Street Journal Online
How hectic is our life? Here's one recent sign: Amy, my wife, took half a day off from work recently just to catch up on the laundry.

The problem (I say defensively) isn't that I'm a slacker husband. In fact, I'm often washing and folding clothes, and I do most of the grocery shopping, cooking and kitchen cleanup. My point, rather, is that like so many working couples, Amy and I frequently find that even if we had 30 hours in a day we couldn't get around to everything on our to-do list. The upshot is that many household chores - such as the laundry - get punted from one day to the next... and then to the next. I can't tell you how many times my mother-in-law stops by and groans about the Laundromat that has exploded in our laundry room.

Amy and I don't disagree, and as a result, we're considering something that a couple of years ago would have been unthinkable: hiring someone to come in once a week to clean and do the laundry. We've yet to make that final leap, though. And our indecision boils down to this question: Is domestic help an unnecessary luxury, or is it a modern necessity?

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I realize that paying for a housekeeper is beyond the pocketbooks of many people, and that this whole debate may feel like an indulgent exercise. I've always thought it was off-limits for me, too. Amy and I both come from a background where the only housekeeper we knew was TV's Hazel. Such lavishness fell to a moneyed crowd, and both of us grew up in neighborhoods where Hazel was more likely to live than work.

We still find ourselves stuck in that mind-set. While we've reached a point where we can afford a person once a week, at some level it's not really about the cost so much as it is the perception. Isn't keeping your own house clean part of life? And doesn't a housekeeper imply we have no better use for our money than to spend it on the extravagance of hiring someone to handle our mess?

Or is our mind-set simply too dated?

I talked to several people about this, and to my surprise, they all insisted that a housekeeper was either a necessity or something that was well worth considering.

"It is an absolutely essential investment in the sanity and well-being of my family," says Alex, a friend in New York. She and her husband, John, are a dual-career couple. When the workday ends, Alex isn't looking to put her feet up and relax. She wants to cook for her family and spend time with her daughter. But that doesn't leave time for folding clothes and cleaning the bathroom.

"For us," Alex says, "coverage on the home front allows me and John to do what we do professionally, and come home to a clean house, the errands done, so that we can focus on engaging with our daughter." A few hours after talking to Alex, she shot me an email to say that she and her family discussed this topic over dinner and that all had "agreed that we'd trade off vacations for the family benefit of having a housekeeper help us keep things clean and in order."

Another friend says that while he could "never argue that I have to have a housekeeper and that I couldn't live without one," the reality is that he has one come in every Monday to clean the house. "Economically and psychologically, the cost [$70] is well worth it to me," he says. "I could do the cleaning, and it would take me at least three hours. But those are hours I'd have to take from somewhere else -- specifically, from spending time with my daughter. I look at it like this: I'm paying $70 a week to have three hours of relatively uninterrupted time with my daughter. That's money well spent."

Yet a third friend, a single mom, has struggled for a long time with the question of whether a housekeeper is a luxury or a necessity. Her arguments sound a lot like mine and Amy's. "I hate to waste money on things I can do myself," she says. "I am absolutely capable of doing the dishes, vacuuming a rug and scrubbing a bathtub. Hiring a housekeeper seems like such an indulgence."

But while she can do it herself, she often doesn't, because between her work and her daughter, housework gets pushed down the priority list. Laundry piles up. Floors aren't swept. It all "creates an added level of stress," she says. "When we don't have the right clean clothes, that makes small things like getting ready for school in the morning more complicated."

She can't afford the $75 a week that a housekeeper would cost, and trimming that back to once every other week seems pointless. Her compromise: Since laundry is her biggest bogey, she says, "I drop it off at the wash-and-fold place down the street whenever I start to get behind. It costs me about $25 to $50 a month, a cost I can live with. It has eased the housecleaning burden just enough to make my life more manageable."

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In my conversations, I kept hearing the same refrain: In the luxury vs. necessity debate, kids are the X-factor.

When our life revolved around me and Amy, we had no need for domestic intervention. It never crossed our minds. But kids have altered our math. Our weekends are now defined by soccer games and Cub Scout meetings, birthday parties and homework. While I'm at the market with our 3-year-old, Amy's home cleaning what she can while helping our 10-year-old study.

During the week, the scheduling is generally worse because the obligations are crammed into far fewer hours in the evening. We try to press our son into duty on occasion, but by the time he gets home from school or soccer practice, completes his homework, eats and bathes, his time is as squeezed as ours. If he has free time, we want to play with him as a family. We don't want him to feel his days are a monotonous blur of work at school and more work at home.

Talking to friends has sealed the deal for me. Though I still feel queasy hiring someone to manage a mess I think we should be managing ourselves, I recognize that we're only creating a level of unnecessary tension in our life. Really, Amy shouldn't have to take vacation time just to fold clothes. Neither of us should have to walk past the laundry room feeling guilty for ignoring the mountain because we have another cliff to scale first.

So, we're going to look for someone to come in once a week to manage the laundry. The rest of our chores we can handle.

I'm not convinced it is a necessity, but I know it will feel like a luxury not to have to worry about that pile of clothes Amy and I were supposed to get to yesterday.