If you’re new - I wrote the How to Hire A Maid like a book. Click Table of Contents for future articles and links to old blogs in a more comprehensible order – or just click here & go to the bottom to read it straight through by scrolling up to each article.

At some point the potential maid comes to see your house, gives you a price and sets up a schedule.

You need to make the following point extremely clear:

You do not want her to clean your whole house in one visit. You are just hiring her to clean two or three rooms at a time. You have another maid that cleans the whole house. 

You are going to have a checklist for each of your rooms as you walk through your house. Show her the list, talk and act through each item (quickly). Ask when she is available and when she needs to leave.   Try to find out how booked she is. Maids are very reluctant to reveal how many people they are really working for. I don’t know if they think that their employers are out to report them to the IRS for the 10% cut of the unreported income or they think they can fool their employers over the length of time they’re really at the house. The answer she gives you can only be regarded as a best-case answer.