Hi, I am Sherry Cooper,
                        The Original Dust Bunny.

When I was a kid in the sixties, it was not commonplace
like it is today to have someone come in to do the cleaning.
Today over ten milion households have someone come in on a
regular basis to clean their house. The same goes for landscape
and pool maintenence. We are busier than we have ever
been as a society, so we let other specialists come to our
property to handle these  unpleasant and time-consuming jobs
while we do other things we prefer.  

I grew up in rural Minnesota near the North Dakota border.
Those are some tough people up there. If you talk to me you
will notice I have an accent that sounds like I was part of the
cast for the movie Fargo. As a child I learned my Norwegian
grandmother's style of cleaning, which would entail wielding
knife along with sundry rags, brushes, and a bucket of boiling
water mixture with a pine-scent steaming out of the top. The
knife was to get into the corners and along the edges and no
self-respecting dirt could last long under such an onslaught of 
determination and muscle. As a child, I thought this perfection
and overcleaning was normal. No mirror could have a streak
and floors needed to shine. We beat the rugs outside over the
clothesline until there were no poofs of dust! The cliche "we
didn't cut corners, we cleaned them" was how we did it. The
ultimate compliment was to overhear a neighbor say that the
house was so clean "you could eat off the floor!" A lot has
changed with cleaning, but I still use a pointy object to get
into some edges and corners that a brush won't fit into!

From 1977 until 1997 I worked in an office. I am not a dress up
kind of person and got weary of wearing suits and hoisery and
heels. So I worked in a medical labratory at night and cleaned
a house or two in the daytime because people I knew asked me to.

I never expected to earn a living from cleaning, but it happened
in a funny way. I finally decided I had been cold long enough
in my life in 2003 and researched moving to a warmer
climate. Winter Park felt like a good fit, so I moved to Florida. 
I was ready for a simple life of strolling in shorts and sandals
and sipping lemonade by the pool. I moved to Winter Park just
before the hurricane onslaught in 2004. Because of my finance
background, I worked for the Federal Government (SBA)
reviewing applications for people to get loans to rebuild their
businesses and homes. Once that temporary job was finished,
I kept thinking about how the hurricanes involved a lot of clean
up and I knew how to do that, so a career was born. The ironic
thing is that my mother, Hilda, spent her working years
cleaning houses and believe me,  I never thought I would follow
in her footsteps. Now I have trained employees and being a 
"hands on" kind of person, I join in on the cleaning to be
sure the standard stays high.

For us as house cleaning technicians, it's rewarding to make a
home sparkle and know that people are enjoying that. I have
a good feeling when I walk back out to the car after 
cleaning a house because I know that having one's living
quarters clean and in order is important to well-being.
As people, we perform best in a clean and clutter-free
environment. It feels good to give that to people. 

Can you put a value on the feeling of walking into your home to
a nice clean scent and all is picked up and sparkling? Your
home is a retreat! A clean house is a stress reducer so you can
more easily handle the other stresses in your life. Studies show
that a clean and pleasant environment plays a big role in the
functioning, health, productivity, and well-being of its occupants.
A clean house is a gift. It feels like wearing a new fashionable
outfit or driving a shiny new car!