I can clean my own house. I'd rather pay someone to do it and spend Saturday with my family.

The author (not pictured) hires a cleaning person to have more time with her family.

Alina Rudya/Bell Collective/Getty Images I initially struggled to justify adding a cleaning service to our household budget.

Working from coffee shops could cost me nearly $20 a day for coffee and food.

I started working from home more often and prioritized cleaners over that expense Cleaning my house sometimes feels like an exercise in futility.

Benjamin Franklin wrote that the only two certainties in life are death and taxes.

I would humbly like to add a third: that a dog will track muddy pawprints across a freshly mopped floor.

The author's dog with muddy paws.

Courtesy of the author Growing up in a blue-collar family , I never considered paying someone to clean my home once I had a place of my own.

My mother cleaned our house herself, and I learned to do the same at a young age.

From apartments to a starter home with my husband to our second home with kids, my husband and I handled all of the cleaning ourselves.

And while I didn't love the work of keeping a home clean, I did love having a partner who shared the workload.

My weekends were filled with chores When we moved to a larger home to accommodate two active school-age children, several pets, and a dedicated home office , I realized that our weekends had become an endless rotation of chores.

There was vacuuming and mopping, bathrooms to scrub, surfaces to dust, and floors to clean.

Not to mention laundry.