Cleaners and cable dressing. Arrrgh!

You allow a cleaner anywhere within 2 miles of your system? Ours knows not to touch anything.

I would not allow my own brother......

I know, and normally she would have been given some instruction, but my wife had a minor operation on her eye this morning and arrived home just after the cleaner had come. I then had to drop my wife at the rail station on my way back to work so she could collect her mother who was arriving for Christmas so neither of us had time to speak to the cleaner. 

All I can say is thank goodness I had placed the lid on my LP12. The Kandid survived!

The answer is, of course, to clean the house yourself. 

Very true HH. Easier to say when you work part time. 

We did it when we both worked full time too. But we only have a little house. 

.. and a seven bedroom house?

Well there's a problem I am unlikely to ever have Steve, I've always felt guilty for having a gardener, a cleaner would be a step too far I think

My wife and I do all our gardening though. 

I tried it Steve but I lack the knowledge and the enthusiasm, sometimes it's best to pay an expert.  I have a small house but a large garden so it works for me.

Hi-fi safe cleaning instructions: "Don't clean anything in THIS ROOM. I will clean it myself later!"

First world problems

Yes. Aren't we lucky.

I had to smile while reading this; it sounds all too familiar.  My problem is explaining that Yes, you should dust the top, sides and back of the speakers but under no circumstances touch the funny looking things in front.  And as for crossing wires... most audiophiles who haven't heard the difference will roll their eyes at the concept of cable dressing, much less someone for whom music is what they play over the car radio on long drives to stay awake.

Lucky for me my cleaner noticed how I would rearrange everything to the way it was and now she gives all my snaked wires a wide berth.  I'm just glad she's never asked why.

It is indeed a first world problem, and it's good to be reminded of that.

Not sure what kind of cleaning people you have there in the UK. I tell mine "there's fresh green paper on the TT and a stack of LPs to be cleaned next to the Okki Nokki." When I get home the stylus is spotless as are the albums inserted into fresh sleeves - stacked vertically of course .

You have my full sympathies. I started a post months ago to rant about an incident where my wife pushed the speakers out of the way with the vacuum to clean under them. This is 20.23s mounted on skeet so they slid very smoothly over the polished wood floor. A spike was torn loose from the plinths on the right speaker too so there was no music for a couple weeks while this was fixed.

Now, my wife knows what an arse I can be when someone touches the hifi (she uses it every day but via the app) and I have put the speakers on different shoes which take more force to budge than my wife weighs. The thing is, I do the majority of the cleaning at home (99%) and I had been busy at work and not hoovered in 4 days and the first time my wife uses the vacuum that is what happens.

I had a girlfriend at uni once who also took exception to that fact that I took exception at her moving a pair of Keilidhs from their painstakingly toed in and away from the wall position to be flat up against the wall and the TV to be more "aesthetically pleasing". I was impressed the lass could lift them  but pissed that she did. After all, what would more aesthetically pleasing than a pair of Keilidhs in rosenut? 

I once found my UnitiServe disconnected from mains by the cleaning lady - an overenthusiastic dust-cleaning action. Imagine the horrors of wondering why my entire streaming set up stopped working / servers not visible etc etc, until I found a simple and now an obvious problem.....

Simple solution gents - clean your own listening room like I do!

Ravenswood10 posted:

Simple solution gents - clean your own listening room like I do!

That was the "sad" conclusion / lesson from this unfortunate turn of events....

Steve J posted:

My wife and I do all our gardening though. 

My wife and I share the house cleaning, I do my listening room and she does the rest.

Perhaps we are lucky, we have had the same cleaner for nearly 15 years, ever since we moved to Suffolk and both worked and were out the house for 13/14 hours a day every weekday. Now we are retired we simply cannot be arsed to clean and iron and our cleaning lady is still with us (and keeps us up to speed with village gossip). She is at least 20 years younger than us, so with a modicum of good fortune, should easily outlive us.

Taking the whole system apart for a deep clean every 6 months is, I find, therapeutic and negates the need for intermediate cleaning. 

I don't let anyone else clean any of our cars. The local BMW dealership cannot understand this approach but generally comply. They have even apologised on the one occasion they forgot this rule; fortunately no paintwork damage had occurred. 

The garden is a complete no-go area for me (all plants start with the letter 'W' in my view, weeds) as well, so we have a gardener. I will, under duress, get a lawn mower out and cut the lawns.

Nick from Suffolk posted:

Perhaps we are lucky, we have had the same cleaner for nearly 15 years, ever since we moved to Suffolk and both worked and were out the house for 13/14 hours a day every weekday. Now we are retired we simply cannot be arsed to clean and iron and our cleaning lady is still with us (and keeps us up to speed with village gossip). She is at least 20 years younger than us, so with a modicum of good fortune, should easily outlive us.

Taking the whole system apart for a deep clean every 6 months is, I find, therapeutic and negates the need for intermediate cleaning. 

I don't let anyone else clean any of our cars. The local BMW dealership cannot understand this approach but generally comply. They have even apologised on the one occasion they forgot this rule; fortunately no paintwork damage had occurred. 

The garden is a complete no-go area for me (all plants start with the letter 'W' in my view, weeds) as well, so we have a gardener. I will, under duress, get a lawn mower out and cut the lawns.

 

It sounds most civilized, I must say.

Ravenswood10 posted:

Simple solution gents - clean your own listening room like I do!

Yep. That's what I do and always have.

M 

roger poll posted:

Steve J posted:

My wife and I do all our gardening though. 

My wife and I share the house cleaning, I do my listening room and she does the rest.

and your wonderful garden Roger? 

Off topic perhaps (at least it's nothing to do with hi-if) but I once came home early from work to find the cleaner doing her stuff - wearing my slippers, which I thought was rather strange. On a previous occasion when I was in she had asked me to lift a large toy rubber spider off the floor as she was completely arachnophobic (even though it was obviously fake). On the next cleaning day I intentionally left the rubber spider inside one of my slippers at the bottom of my bed. Unfortunately this gentle jousting proved too much for her and she never cleaned for us again.