There is a particular kind of hesitation that happens at about eleven at night, phone in hand, booking page open. You have decided you want help with the housework. You have even settled on a day that suits. And then a small parade of questions arrives, none of which you especially want to say out loud: Do I have to clean before the cleaner comes? Should I stay home? What will they think of the state of my kitchen?
If any of that sounds familiar, you are in very good company. Most people who book housekeeping for the first time worry more about the etiquette of it than about the cleaning itself. So here are straight answers to the questions Singapore homeowners tend to be far too polite to ask.
No. You do not need to clean before a cleaning session, and nobody is quietly grading your life choices. But there is a useful difference between cleaning and clearing — and clearing does buy you a noticeably better result. Every minute spent shifting your belongings out of the way is a minute not spent on the actual grime.
A ten-minute walk around the flat beforehand is usually all it takes:
That is genuinely it. The sticky hob, the shower screen, the skirting you have been ignoring since March — that is the job, not yours.
A housekeeping session is booked as a block of hours, which means the honest answer is: what gets done depends on how many hours you book and what you ask for first. A good session usually starts with a two-minute walk-through — where things are kept, which bathroom matters most, whether the aircon ledges are fair game — and then works through the flat in a sensible order rather than darting about.
The most useful thing you can do is name your priorities out loud. "Kitchen and both bathrooms, and please don't worry about the study" is far more helpful than a polite "anything is fine", which tends to spread the same number of hours thinly across every room.
You are welcome to be home, and plenty of people are — working at the dining table, wrangling a toddler, pretending to answer emails. Just as many go out and run errands, which is arguably the whole point of booking in the first place. Either is completely normal.
As for awkward: the first fifteen minutes sometimes are, in the way that anything new in your own home is. It passes quickly. If it helps, treat it like any other appointment — say hello, point out where the cloths and bin bags live, agree on what matters most, then get on with your day. Keep valuables and documents put away, as you would with any visitor, and let your housekeeper know if there is a nervous cat behind the sofa.
This is the question that trips up the most people, and the distinction is simpler than it sounds. Housekeeping is the regular upkeep that keeps a home ticking over — surfaces, floors, bathrooms, the kitchen, the everyday reset. Deep cleaning is the bigger, slower, get-into-the-corners job: the build-up behind and beneath things, the grout, the bits that a weekly tidy never reaches.
Plenty of people in Singapore start with one proper deep clean to draw a line under years of humidity and cooking, then keep it that way with regular housekeeping afterwards. And if the problem is more specific — an aircon that smells faintly of a swimming pool, a sofa that has absorbed a decade of family life, mould creeping along a damp wall — Nimbus Homes has separate services for those, so you are not asking a general clean to do a specialist's job.
Nobody is coming to judge your flat. They are coming to clean it, which is a rather different errand. The only real preparation is clearing a bit of space and being clear about what you want — and the reward is walking back into a home that smells faintly of nothing at all, in the best possible way.
If you have been hovering over that booking page for a while, you can see what is available and pick a slot at book.nimbushomes.com. No tidying required first. Truly.
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