Confessions of a millionaire’s cleaner: The embarrasing, disgusting and weird things I’ve seen while cleaning the homes of the super-wealthy

I am a cleaner and have had my own business for over 30 years, living in the Home Counties some of my clients are millionaires.

But while the phrase “filthy rich” may be shorthand for wealth beyond your wildest dreams, for me it’s an all too accurate description. I spend my life trying to bring order to their disgusting homes.

From rooms full of dog poop to toilets that don’t flush – and many other things that make you sick – I’ve seen it all. And I’ve learned that the more money you have, the dirtier and ruder you’re likely to be. I often say that I wipe my shoes when I leave the fanciest homes I work at, not when I go in.

Take a couple of my (now former) clients: let’s call them Mr and Mrs R. The couple live near one of the best state girls’ schools in Britain, which their daughter attends. The annual fees are around £40,000.

I did four hours a week and worked for them for four years, but because Mrs R clearly regarded me as ‘lower class’, she rarely spoke to me except to give orders.

Worse yet, her house was downright filthy. Every week I made it look like a show home and every week when I arrived it looked like I had never been there before. So it was back to square one and I never got a chance to get it under control.

The showers were black with mold that no amount of cleaning products could remove. Believe me, I tried.

I insisted on washing her dirty dishes in the sink, refusing to even open the dishwasher door – the smell made me gag. I don’t know how she could stand it; but it wasn’t my job to clean them, so I kept my mouth shut.

I could also stand the dirty underwear on the floor, but what made me decide was the day she asked me to change the sheets on the marital bed. There were so many stains on them that I could hardly stand to look at them – I won’t go into it because it’s so disgusting. I resigned on the spot.

The reality is that many homes that are breathtakingly beautiful on the outside are breathtakingly beautiful on the inside for all the wrong reasons.

There was one place I called “Mucky Mansions.” It was a small, stately home with two dogs and filled with antique, cobwebbed furniture and worn carpets.

The first time I was there, my vacuum cleaner rolled over dog poop in the hallway. It was so dark because of the old-fashioned lighting that I couldn’t see anything.

When I tried to clean the kitchen floor, there was more of the same. You’d think the owner would be terribly embarrassed, but he wasn’t. “Don’t worry, girl, just go around it,” he said in a resigned voice as he laid down newspapers to cover it, and left me to mop around it. After that, I had to mop a new stack of newspapers every week.

I was forbidden to clean the bedrooms – probably just as well, because when I looked inside, it looked like a collector’s paradise, full of clutter.

The final straw was when one of their dogs came in with a dead chicken in its mouth and their daughter, in her late twenties, started screaming, “Dad, the dog ate a chicken again.”

Then she started arguing with her mother over a head of lettuce and threw it at her head in front of me.

I believe, as my mother always said, that ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’. My own bed linens are spotless and you can eat your dinner off the floor in any room in the house – and I have two dogs.

That’s one of the reasons I became a cleaner. Besides being my own boss and setting my own hours, I love cleaning and transforming people’s homes.

It gives me such satisfaction to see a messy house transformed into a clean, shiny home with gleaming showers, immaculate countertops and plumped pillows. I will never get rich from it, but it pays the bills.

Yet the filthy attitudes of some customers make working for them a living hell.

Take Mrs K for example. She has more designer bags, shoes and scarves (often still unopened in their boxes) than Harrods.

But the day I raised my rates – by just £3.50 an hour – for the first time in five years, she tried to negotiate. When I refused, she cut my hours from six to three, claiming she couldn’t afford it. It was no great loss to me, as she often failed to understand that I was the cleaner, not a butler or housekeeper.

When she had friends over, she wanted me to get and deliver everything for them, including serving tea in beautiful china.

Mrs. T. is a sweet lady who is always polite, but her house is a hurricane of designer clothes scattered everywhere.

She and her husband may be able to afford expensive things, but they don’t stay nice for long.

I once got a lecture about the new marble floor in the bathroom and what cleaning products I could and could not use on it. But now it is ruined because the men of the house – they have two sons – can’t ‘aim straight’ and the acid has ruined the marble.

A teenage son leaves repellent tissues on his bedside table and, worse yet, picks his nose and smears the residue on the walls of his room and in the shower.

In other ways she’s just plain lazy. Take the pillowcases – she can’t be bothered to wash them, so she just puts new ones on top of the old ones. I counted five on one pillow!

Sometimes situations are just plain embarrassing. I had a client who walked around topless without a trace of shame. I once saw her walking around naked in her bedroom with the door wide open while a group of workmen were working down the hall.

And then there was that horrible time I knocked on a male client’s bathroom door and he said, “Come in,” and he sat on the toilet and just looked at me without a care in the world. I was so embarrassed and apologized. Then I ran away as fast as I could. When I saw him later, he acted like it never happened.

And then there was the personal trainer of rich, bored housewives. I decided to give her bedroom a good clean, but her nightstand had no doors and while I was dusting, a pile of photos fell out.

I picked them up and discovered that they were photos of her in, let’s say, intimate positions.

There was no way I could put them back in the order they fell out, so she would inevitably know I had seen them. Why didn’t she move them before I came?

I couldn’t look her in the eye, so I told her that my client list had become too full and that I needed to cut back. I knew she would understand once she saw the stack of photos.

I can’t decide if people are lazy, forgetful, or just plain ignorant. Your home may be your refuge from the public eye, but it doesn’t make things invisible. If you hire a cleaner, it’s wise to remember that.