We built the cleaning company we wished existed.

The baby had finally gone down.

It was 9pm on a Tuesday, and we were standing in the kitchen staring at a sink we hadn't reached in four days. We had a newborn, two dogs that seemed to shed for a living, and a house that used to feel like ours and now felt like a running list of our failures.

We kept saying we'd get help. But finding that help turned into one more chore.

There were voicemails that went unanswered. Companies that wanted to schedule an in-home estimate, as if we had an afternoon sitting around unused. And when someone finally came, it was often a different person each time. Someone who didn't know our little dachshund panicked around the vacuum, or where we kept the clean sheets, or how carefully we were trying to protect the small world our son had just arrived into.

The house was clean when they left. But the smell of chemicals stayed for hours, and more than once we caught ourselves hesitating before setting our baby down on a floor we'd just paid to have cleaned.

We were doing everything right, and it still felt wrong.

And it clearly wasn't working for the cleaners, either. No company sends a different stranger into your home every week because the system is working. It happens because the person doing the work is treated as replaceable. Underpaid, unsupported, and gone long before they could come to know the families they serve.

That was the part we couldn't get past. Our frustration as customers and the way those cleaners were treated weren't two separate problems. They were the same one.

So we started imagining the company we'd needed all along. One where you could get a price and a time without chasing anyone down. Where the same trusted people came back, week after week, until they knew your home the way you do. The sheets, the routines, the nervous little dog. Where the products were gentle enough that we'd set our own child on the floor without a second thought.

And, above all, where the person caring for your home was paid, supported, and respected as the professional they are, because nothing else works without that.

That is why we started HomeMaid.