Monday, January 7, 2002
Cleaning lady leaves homes shining from top to bottom
By Nancy Steele Brokaw
For The Pantagraph
BLOOMINGTON -- Patty Sharick likes everything "clean and shiny." To that end, she will get her clothes wet scrubbing out a shower, re-vacuum until she leaves perfectly parallel lines in the carpet and sanitize a toilet to the point that she'll say "you could drink out of it if you wanted to."
Patty is a cleaning lady. Since 1989, she has been cleaning homes, most often while her customers are at work. During the time Patty is alone in other people's homes she likes to, in her words, "play house," pretending each house belongs to her.
What her customers don't know, Patty suspects, is how attached she becomes to the families. These are people she seldom sees (and in some cases never sees), but that doesn't prevent her from vicariously experiencing the ebb and flow of each family's life.
Piles of used tissues in the wastebasket, prescription bottles near the sink and a heating pad on the couch mean someone is sick. Foil-wrapped coffeecakes on the kitchen counter and a stack of sympathy cards signal a death in the family. Those "connections" are an enjoyable part of a job Patty never intended to have. Many of her friends cleaned, but Patty, a rural Ellsworth resident, swore she'd never become a cleaning lady. Her life changed her mind.
Patty married Skip right out of high school. Babies came right away. Patty always worked part time, mostly in retail. She often clerked in the hardware department of Sears. ("I love hardware," Patty says. "that's my favorite department in a store.")
Eventually, as family finances improved, she quit her part-time jobs to do more volunteer work with her congregation, the Jehovah's Witnesses. Then, in 1989, Skip unexpectedly lost his job and Patty needed to go back to work. What drew her to cleaning was the flexibility of the job.
She started cleaning houses with a girlfriend, learning on the job how to clean houses efficiently. Before long, Patty was working on her own, and then the whole family got involved. Now, Patty is part of Command Cleaning, a business she shares with Skip, who does commercial cleaning. Their three grown children, a daughter-in-law and a brother-in-law also are part of the operation.
Patty occasionally will help Skip with a commercial job and she does all the bookkeeping. But what really satisfies her is the actual cleaning. Patty likes to clean and knows she's good at it.
The pay, Patty feels, is equitable. For an average-sized, two-story home, requiring around four hours to clean, Patty charges $80. From the roughly $20 an hour she earns, Patty must pay taxes and purchase cleaning supplies.
Patty has 11 customers and spends about 23 hours a week cleaning homes, almost all in Bloomington. She arranges her schedule to be home when Ryan, 7, comes home from school.
On this day, Patty shows up at a customer's house in her usual cleaning outfit -- jeans, white T-shirt and leather tennis shoes. She endured bleach spots on a lot of nice shirts before she learned to always wear white and she got tired of soggy feet before she switched to leather shoes.
For the most part, Patty follows the same systematic approach at each house. She wheels in her caddy, containing her favorite brands of cleaning supplies, a "green scrubby pad," a toilet bowl brush, lots of rags and a transistor radio. Talk shows prevent loneliness in the quiet houses she cleans.
Patty thinks in terms of "tops and bottoms."
Tops include cobwebs, ceiling fans and cabinet tops. Baseboards and vents fall into the bottoms category. None of these items require cleaning every time, so Patty consults her notebook to see which special top and bottom jobs she will do today.
The kitchen, the most challenging room to clean, always comes first, followed by the bathrooms.
Patty likes to begin with the "wet work" so her clothes will have time to dry out before she leaves. Next comes the living room and dining room and, last, the bedrooms.
Always, Patty works from top to bottom, beginning with a feather duster and then moving to dusting and polishing.
Sunlight is important, Patty says. Each room looks different as the light from windows illuminates first one corner, then another.
The floors are last. Patty is careful not to leave footprints on the carpet.
She likes to scrub floors just before she leaves, hoping that the clean scent of Pine-Sol will linger in the air until the customer returns home. Customers tell Patty that they love to "smell the clean" after she's been there.
Communication is the key to a good relationship with her customers. Patty loves it when they tell her what they like.
For example, one customer was surprised to open her microwave one night to find Patty had scrubbed it without being told. She told Patty it was "a moment."
Pleasing older customers can involve different sorts of things. Since their homes don't get particularly dirty, they will sometimes have Patty perform different tasks such as laundry or running errands.
New customers will occasionally "test" a cleaning lady by doing things like leaving money around to see if it's stolen or hiding an object behind a curtain to see if it gets picked up.
Patty has experienced some of this but has been with most of her customers for years now and is, thankfully, beyond all that.
She does have a few pet peeves, though. Chief among them is being locked out. Patty insists on a "trip fee" of $15 when that happens, which isn't very often.
Most of her customers have either given her a key or information that will gain her access to the house.
Flocked Christmas trees are also a source of cleaning frustration. Patty says she's still cleaning up after them in July.
Patty, who is nearly 50 and has suffered back and knee injuries on the job, no longer scrubs floors on her hands and knees.
If a customer insists on this, she'll bring in a younger member of the crew to do it.
Patty says it's helpful if customers pick up before she comes. It's hard to do her job if the floors are littered with clothes and the counters are covered with papers.
She does not appreciate it, though, when people actually clean before she comes. She'd much prefer they leave the dirt and grime for her. Patty likes the satisfaction of finding a house dirty and leaving it "clean and shiny."
Sometimes, if Patty knows a customer won't be home for a long time, she'll leave some Pine-Sol in the toilet bowl, like a scented calling card, another reminder that she's been there, along with the sparkling sinks, shiny mirrors and straight vacuum lines.
. http://www.pantagraph.com/stories/010702/new_20020107003.shtml