Category: household

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How Do You Keep Your House So Clean?

I used to boggle at my mother being able to keep her house as neatly as she does. I always rather had visions of her spending hours sneaking in cleaning when I was at school, or during the summer, when I was at friends’ houses or summer jobs. It had to be that way, because keeping my room neat was such a damn ordeal! When I moved out, I found trying to keep a neat house totally overwhelming, and wished I had the energy to spend those hours and hours cleaning that I thought my mother put in. In the last few years I’ve learned this wasn’t really so. Most of the cleaning I actually saw her doing was the work that was getting done.

My house is quite as neat and clean as hers is these days. No, I don’t spend a great deal of time on the house. Know why? I don’t bloody well have the time to spend hours cleaning. If it took that kind of time, neatness simply wouldn’t happen. Call it an average of 15-20 minutes a day doing actual cleaning, and tack on a few minutes for clutter patrol.

What Mom Really Tried to Teach Me (And I Didn’t Listen)

My mother really did try to teach me to keep a clean house. No, it wasn’t Housewife Training, but more Grownup Training. She tried to teach my brother the same thing, after all. She grew up with someone who kept house the way I used to – let the clutter and mess get so overwhelming that it’s intolerable and/or embarrassing, then spend an effort worthy of the Augean stables only to be worn out and not really into doing any more housework for a long period of time. Mom, who actually learned from that nonsense, did things differently when she became mistress of her own home.

There are four basic principles that my mother tried to teach me, and one I learned on my own that doesn’t quite jibe with the way Mom does things, but works for me. Combined? I get a neat home, and don’t spend a whole lot of time at it.

Put it away right away

When you come in the door, if you habitually take off your shoes, put them on the shoe shelf. Have a place to hang up your backpack and jacket, and put them there right away. Have a place for your keys and put them there right away. Sort mail over the trash can and have a place for the bills if you still do paper bills. If you have a cup of coffee and you’re not going to have any more, either wash the mug or put it in the dishwasher.

Finished with a book? Put it back on the shelf. That pen you used to write a note? Put it back in the pen mug or your desk drawer. Dishwasher washed dishes overnight? Put those dishes away while the coffee’s brewing. See a piece of paper that fell on the floor? Pick it up and throw it away right now. Dirty underwear? You do have a laundry hamper near where you undress for the night, yes? Don’t leave the underwear in a figure 8 on the floor. It takes two seconds to put it in the hamper.

Now, if you’re dealing with a Very Cluttered Home like mine used to be, you’re probably staring at me in astonishment. Put things away? I can’t open the blasted drawer! What’s the matter with you? Hamper? Darlin’, if you could see my Mount Laundry, you wouldn’t be telling me to put my underwear in any hamper right away. It’s overflowing!

Clutter makes things take more time

I used to have a deacons bench that was my toy box. It would get stuffed with crap I tried to hide when Mom insisted I clean my room. Part of the End of Holidays ritual was to clean out my toy box and get rid of toys I no longer wanted. Now, you’d think a kid who had 20 cubic feet of storage space for toys would be able to clean her room just fine, but never got rid of stuff I didn’t use or love except at practically gunpoint.

So, when I was told to dust or vacuum my bedroom, it would take for-blasted-evuh. Did Mom tell me that it wouldn’t take so much time if I would put my stuff away? Yes, she did. I didn’t start doing it until I was in my late thirties. I timed myself dusting my bedroom yesterday. 00:02:34. Two minutes and thirty-four seconds. The whole house took about eight minutes, and I have a pretty good-sized house. (In all fairness, I did skip my son’s room for more or less the same reason my mother didn’t dust mine, I expect!)

It’s not the cleaning chores that take a lot of time. In general, they really don’t. It’s cleaning around the clutter that is so excruciating. Now it’s taken me several years to get my house to what I consider “properly” decluttered.

Cleanup is part of the job

The last step to making dinner is to clean up after dinner. The last step in sewing an outfit is to vacuum up all the snips of fabric and thread and put away the sewing machine (I don’t have a dedicated craft room.) Make your bed on arising. This last was a childhood requirement. I fell out of doing it for a period of time as an adult, and I’m going to have to say that was a Big Mistake. With a comforter and pillow shams, it takes less than a minute to make a bed, and it’s hard to believe how much better it makes a room look until you’ve gotten into the habit.

If you mentally tag cleanup as separate from the activity at hand, you’re giving yourself permission to make “later” “never”. I get it, don’t get me wrong. When I’m finished with an outfit, putting away the ironing board, the sewing machine, all the notions and all that is a pain in the butt. Never mind those projects that take several days to do. But if you mentally tag the job as unfinished until tidying up is done, you find that it genuinely takes less time to keep things tidy.

A good example of this would be laundry. Laundry isn’t done when the dryer goes off, or things are dry on the line. Laundry is done when you put your clothes away.

Take a few seconds now

I had to go upstairs to go to the bathroom while writing this – coffee, you know. My bathroom is right off my bedroom, so as I passed the bed, I saw that my son had delivered everyone’s clean and folded laundry to the appropriate bedrooms. I took about two minutes to put away some socks and hang up some shirts and pants before coming back downstairs to finish this particular section of the article. Could it have waited for me until bedtime? Well, yeah, and if there were a blood or fire emergency, it could wait days. But I am writing. I can think about what I’m writing while I hang up clothes!

This is a serious change from my usual M.O. In the past, thinking I was being more efficient, I’d wait for the household to have Washed All The Laundry before I would even consider putting things away. After all, putting it away in a big chunk instead of load by load saves time, right? It’s efficient.

Sure, if you actually put away that mountain of clean clothes in a timely fashion. If you do, more power to you. I wouldn’t.

There are lots of little tasks like this. Spill something on the floor, wipe it up right away and it’s quick and easy. Wait, and it’s a dried, sticky mess. Take a second while coffee is brewing to wipe off a counter and it’s using waiting time for usefulness. When you walk through a room to another room, scan and see if there’s anything that really belongs in your destination and put it there. You were going into the other room anyway, right? It’s the little minutes that add up.

Break down the big jobs into little jobs

No-one in my family is particularly moderate. Mom comes closer than the rest of us, but even she really isn’t much into the moderation thing. We have no middle gears. If we needed to chop wood for the winter’s heating (yes, we heated with a wood stove), we had to Chop All The Wood. Decluttering my toybox? Well, yes, but we cleaned out my closet, under my bed, the bookshelves and everything until my room was Perfect. The theory was I had a clean slate to Keep Things Tidy From Now On and Forever.

Now, Mom never let the rest of the house get cluttered, so this wasn’t an issue. But I learned something about trying to train yourself into the habit of keeping up on keeping things clean and organized. You gotta pace yourself. Cluttered home? Really, no kidding, commit to a little bit of time a day to do that. It’ll take some time. In my case it was a period of years. Thing is, over those years, the house did finally get decluttered to the point where I only have to do some really quick maintenance decluttering in my regular detail cleaning schedule.

Even now, with a reasonably decluttered home, I certainly am not going to then spend time on marathon cleaning projects. Heck no! That time I spent decluttering (call it 10-15 minutes a day) is now spent on some tiny little detail cleaning project that I never ever used to get to. You know, dusting the baseboards in one room, or vaccuming behind the sofa. I’ve put these tasks (there’s over 100 of them, none taking more than fifteen minutes to do) on my daily reminders in a very long repeating rotation, so they all get gotten to (shaddup, I’m allowed some bad grammar) but it’s never this marathon, “ZOMGWTFBBQ! I GOTTA CLEAN PEOPLE ARE COMING OVER!” nonsense.

Yet guess what?

The house looks good and I don’t spend hours cleaning.

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Clean All the Things

I am not particularly neat by nature or general habit.

I am neat by taste. I like order. You can see the conflict, yes?

I do have some habits to take care of this adapted from Flylady. We do have a slightly different approach, but the goals are similar. We’re messy packrats who really would prefer to live in a neat home, and frankly made a pig’s ear out of the attempt for most of our lives.

Part of what I do is daily routine. (Make my bed the minute I get up, make sure the kitchen is cleaned up once a day, etc.)

Part of what the household does is weekly routine. Clean All the Things. (Declutter, dust, vacuum, change bedsheets, give hard floors a quick damp mop). Depending on how bad things are, this can take from 20 minutes to an hour. It’s not enough for white glove inspections, but it keeps the house from degenerating into chaos, and getting used to piles of clutter in corners to the point where we don’t even “see” them as we climb over them. I’ve lived like that and I didn’t feel good with it. Hence the change.

This week was definitely a 20 minute week, especially as my son and I did a very thorough Clean All the Things last week.

In fact, so much so that when I commented it was time to Clean All the Things, my son objected, saying the house wasn’t very messy. (It wasn’t). I said that he was right. The house wasn’t all that messy, so if we did Clean All the Things, it wouldn’t take very long. Neither would it next week. Stuff wouldn’t pile up. He still disagreed.

We took a vote1, and his father and I carried by a 2/3 majority, so All the Things got Cleaned.

I talk a lot about the mundane keeping up of stuff, I know. It’s something I never learned as a child. Not that no-one tried to teach me, mind. It’s just that it was really difficult for me to learn, and I didn’t even really see the value of it. I was into epics, for pity’s sake! Heroic effort, I could value, and get into. Moderate, patient, long-term effort? Not so much. It’s why being able to keep my house clean on a regular basis was such a victory for me and one I still reflect on a great deal.

Now, my pleasure centers still light up at the intensity of effort stuff, and I think that’s okay. I can pour everything into the few hours I’m in front of a class. That’s not hurting anything. In fact, it’s good. But then I need to go home and be patiently moderate about studying for the next class, writing the handouts, and dealing with the other aspects of my life.

I think the theme of this year is going to be learning to be moderately immoderate.

Though I swear, I thought you were supposed to have everything sorted out by the time you were in your forties?2 Goodness knows, my grandparents seemed to in their own minds. I wish I could ask them what they were working on personally (if anything) when they were my age. My parents had my brother and I to deal with. NO-ONE could possibly feel like everything was sorted with us as children. We were kinda challenging to rear.

 

1 Unlike many homes, that vote was not fake. If 2 out of the three of us voted not to Clean All the Things, None of the Things would have been Cleaned.

2 At least, it’s what I used to think at sixteen. Yes, I know, in many ways I’m mentally still a teenager. Stop laughing at me. It’s not nice to laugh at people who can’t help it.

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Decorating for Halloween

My husband and I have been talking about doing some sort of yard decorating for Halloween since… oh gosh, since we got married, I suppose.

Other than pumpkins, we really never have.

This year, our son decided he was too old for trick-or-treating,  and asked what we were going to do for Halloween. I asked him if there were some parties he wanted to go to or anything like that, or if he had any suggestions.  He didn’t have any ideas, so I asked if he’d like to make some tombstones with goofy sayings on them like Disney’s Haunted Mansion.  He was enthusiastic.  So, when I put it to his father, of course we got an enthusiastic yes as well.

This was goofy, but fun.  We got some foamboard, Peter cut them into shape, we all painted them gray, Peter did the layout and outlines, then Samuel and I painted, coloring very nicely in the lines.

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Garbage Bowl

I don’t watch Rachel Ray. I don’t watch television. But in noodling around the Internet, I did come across the concept of using a garbage bowl while cooking.  No, it wasn’t Rachel, but a chef.

Even though when I saw the idea and lights came on, angels sang choirs of hosannas and I realized it Made My Kitchen Complete, it’s a stupidly simple concept. Have one or two large bowls[1] on the counter beside you to throw scraps and garbage in while you’re cooking. When you’re done, dump everything from the bowl into the garbage. Clean the bowl. Simple, easy and so goofily obvious that I’m amazed that in nearly 30 years of cooking I never thought of it.

I was making spaghetti tonight and used one. Friends, this really does streamline not only cooking, but cleanup. My trash can really won’t “go” anywhere but across the kitchen, and yes, I’m a “clean as you go” cook[2].  So, this method saves me a lot of steps, and interestingly enough, makes clutter containment while cooking much easier.  Even though I’m hardly a professionally-trained chef, I do ascribe to the mise en place philosophy of cooking.  I do not like a mess while I’m making a meal.

I think this would actually be a great technique to teach kids when cooking, as one of the big issues with kids in the kitchen is mess!  Teach ‘em this, and at least some is contained.

So, my faithful readers, do you use a garbage bowl?  Where did you hear of the concept?  How much do you like it?

[1] I think Rachel Ray markets some, but at $15 for a damn plastic bowl, I think that’s useless.  I have LOTS of large bowls, so just haul out a couple (or only one if you’re not saving anything for stock) and use them.

[2] The rest of my household, however, is not.  Instead a CLEAN UP OR DIE sign in my household, I’ve chosen to pick my battles and let this be a Designated Control Freak issue.  It makes household harmony easier to attain.

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Whose Job is the Housework?

“The guys just don’t feel the same way we do about the house. They don’t have the guilt that eats away at them.” Flylady in an answer to a letter about the Husband’s clutter.

Oh boy…

Here’s the problem.  Do you know why men don’t feel guilty if the house looks like shit?  It’s because quite often they feel it’s the woman’s job to clean the house.  You can’t feel guilty about something you feel isn’t your responsibility!

Now, as it happens, I am the one who takes charge of how the house looks.  There are several reasons, and yes, one of the reasons is that I’m the one who cares the most about it and I’ve made some life choices that give me the time.  But you know what?  If I had something else I was doing that I considered important[1], I would consider that the important thing to do.  I will, have and do react incredibly badly to the automatic assumption that having a uterus means that I’m the one who should automagically be in charge of how the house looks.  Lack of help cleaning up after dinner would have me quite disinclined to cook another single meal.   I haven’t the slightest problem with asking people to pick up after themselves, and consistent refusal to do so is definitely a relationship-killer with me.

But the guilt thing?  Friends, that’s some sexist socialization there.  Partnerships and equitability are one thing, but you wouldn’t establish a business partnership with the relationship  and responsibilities unexamined.  Why shoot yourself in the foot with your life partners?

[1] A book deadline, for instance, would mean that instead of me doing the lion’s share of the household chores, we’d be splitting housework up in thirds Or There Would Be Serious Trouble.

 

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Disposable?

I’m not a big fan of disposable stuff in general. No, it’s not some tree-hugger thing, though I’m totally fine with things I do being less wasteful or polluting.

It’s a money-saver.  I don’t use paper towels.  I have cleaning cloths made of old towels.  They’re not just cut up old towels, though.   You take an old towel, cut it in eighths. Then you sew a zig-zag stitch all around the edges to prevent fraying and sew the long ends together into a loose tube.  Depending on how you fold it, this gives you more cleaning surface per cloth, so you don’t go through as many cleaning.  I’ve preferred those for years.  They last a long time, and you can just toss them in with the regular laundry with no problem.  (I don’t use bleach or bleach-based products in cleaning.  You would have to handle them with more care in terms of laundry if you did).

But I always associated cloth napkins with formal dinners until I went to visit a friend in Portland a few years ago.   In the kitchen, there was a basket of clean, folded napkins in cheerful colors and patterns.  I remember seeing it and having to restrain myself from smacking my forehead at the casual sensibleness of cloth napkins.  You buy a set once, then you’re all good for napkins for many years.  They’re so small that it’s insignificant in terms of extra laundry and for me they wouldn’t really cost any extra to acquire.  I mean, I sew.  I’ve always got fabric lying around, so it’s not even as if it would have cost anything for me to have some.  But if you buy paper ones, you’re buying napkins about once a month or so.

I made a set of sixteen.  Since I usually do a load of darks about every two to three days (my napkins are dark burgundy), that’s more than enough.  We never really run out.

What really gets me to thinking about it, though, is how often disposable products are pushed.  The Swiffer Wet-Jet not only needs those disposable pads (well, okay, I use my cleaning cloths with mine, and just attach them with some old hair ties) and the special bottles of cleaner (and I just have a spray bottle of all purpose cleaner to squirt the floor down well), but then there’s the dispoable dusting rags, toilet wands and what have you.  This stuff is silly and wasteful.  It’s not even safer in terms of germs.  If you’re really concerned, use a disinfectant cleaner, spray the surface and let it air dry.  Do you do that? No, of course not.  So don’t be silly about germs and disposable cleaning products.

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Drinking the FlyLady Kool-Aid

I think I’m developing a bit of a split personality about having drunk the Flylady Kool-aid.

On the one hand, I really do like the system quite a bit.   Between the routines, the decluttering and the missions I get in the email, the house looks nice and runs smoothly.  Anyone could walk in right at this second and I would not be embarrassed about how the house looks.

On the other hand, I’m tired of reading testimonials about how a product has changed someone’s life on a site about decluttering.  I’m sorry, but “buy more stuff” is seldom a good solution to a clutter problem, especially when clutter and hoarding problems are usually related to problems with shopping too much in the first place!

On the other hand (yes, I know, three hands.  When do I ever follow a system without adding my own twist?  Get over it)  I’m all for people creating successful small businesses.  I do have a bit of a squick at the idea that she’s selling stuff to people with clutter problems, but only a small one. I mean, the woman sells cleaning cloths, for heaven’s sake.  I might have made my own out of old towels rather than bought some, but it’s a reusable product that’s genuinely useful.

I certainly don’t tell my family Flylady loves us and wants us to have a clean house.  (Yes, some of the testimonials posts have mothers saying that they’ve said this to their children.  I find that creepy as hell). I don’t don’t follow the system exactly.  I am wearing slippers, not shoes. I don’t “bless the house”.  I dust and vacuum.  I don’t put in 15 minutes of “loving movement”.  I work out!  I certainly don’t have some picture of a Cheerful Fairy with a fishing rod and tennis shoes shaking her finger at me on some household appliance.   I look at my schedule and think, “Yep, I need to empty the dishwasher.”

Certainly if all twee nonsense works, it works.  If you need all that to get organized enough to suit yourself, you need it.  I sympathize with needing tools.  My mother, for instance, does not need a notebook or a schedule to keep the house clean. She just does it.  She doesn’t need a battle plan for something as simple and obvious as housekeeping.

And that’s where I get really weirded out.  People will write the author of the Flylady site to argue with her about her system.

Why why why?

You don’t wanna wear shoes in the house, don’t.  If your life wasn’t changed by buying a feather duster, that’s just fine.  If you like spending one day a week cleaning the house from top to bottom rather than using routines, that’s your call.  If you don’t want to worry about having a clean house at all, whose damn life is it, anyway?

You don’t need Flylady’s permission.

Though, I am unsubbing from the list because I’ve got what works for me, and I’m not that into reading commercials.

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Flying Solo

I’ve been teaching my son to cook.  Tonight he made dinner by himself from a recipe, though he did have a bit of an issue with converting the rice recipe to more servings.

Still, the meal came out tasty.

But that’s not the story I wanted to tell.

See, I’ve been doing the Flylady system for awhile in my house.  Decluttering, Zone work, routines — all that smack.  It sounds goofy, but the house looks nice, so laugh all you want.

What’s even goofier is that I have a notebook for my household routines.  It’s a checklist of chores that need to happen every morning, early evening and before bed, as well as any zone work that needs to happen.  It’s a printout of a checklist in plastic sheet protectors, so I can just use dry-erase markers to check ’em off and wipe ’em off for the next day.  Laugh it up, but at least this means I get to detailed cleaning in each room.  I’m not naturally neat, and can ignore a pig sty for a long time (just ask my mother what it was like to raise me), so anything that works is really nothing short of a miracle.

I have it for myself, to keep me on track, but it’s on the counter in the kitchen because it also has the menu plan and the recipe book I’d written as a teaching tool for my son.

Tonight, the man of the house was cleaning up after dinner, and actually went through that checklist, sweeping the floor and things I don’t think are mentally part of washing the dishes in his eyes.

I hadn’t asked him to.  In fact, I’d assumed he hadn’t, didn’t look and just went to sweep the floor when he asked me if I’d looked at the checklist.  Since I do have the notebook mostly as a self-reminder, I didn’t give it a lot of thought.  Most of the kitchen cleanup had been done.  I just made coffee for tomorrow.

No, I don’t think a control journal (that’s what Flylady calls the household notebook), is going to make the household magic, and everyone will decide to be as concerned with keeping the house clean as the DCF.  It won’t.

And it doesn’t need to.

What is cool about it for my household is that it gives clear and rather impersonal guidelines for keeping the house clean and picked up.  Instead of a person constantly reminding, there’s this list that stays there all the time. Yeah, I know I wrote it.  That’s not the point.  It’s that what needs to be done and what gets done become impersonally clear at all times.

Now I’m lucky.  I live in a household of people that like to contribute.  I can’t imagine that if it were a household where people were upset with each other and didn’t mutually care about the condition of the home, nor mutually contributing to the pleasantness of the household that a control journal would do a damn bit of good.  So no, it’s not the magic a lot of Flylady testimonials like to put out there.

But it is a good tool.

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Not Just Fifteen Minutes

I got bored yesterday and did something impossibly geeky.  I timed myself doing every single task on my Flylady routine.  Including cooking and making bento, it came to about ten minutes under two hours.  (Take away the cooking and bento and you’re looking at 1:16:10)

Now, in Real Life, I don’t do every chore myself.   That fifteen minutes it takes to do the evening routine is generally cut in half because the whole household helps clean up after dinner, set up the coffee pot for the next day and all that.  Call eight minutes at the outside.  I don’t clean every bathroom in the house, nor do I generally fold the laundry or take out the trash.

So the idea that you can keep your house clean in fifteen minutes a day is a little inaccurate.   It’d be fair to say I spend about an hour and a half, if I include meal preparation.

But it’s not like I spend that whole hour at once.  The routines really do average out to just under fifteen minutes for each of them.

What I don’t do:

Make the bed perfectly.  Good lord, what a waste of time.  Spread it up, toss the pillow shams at the head, you’re good.

Spend hours cleaning the bathroom.   Swish-n-swipe daily.  Hit it once a month with some serious detail cleaning over a week.  Good enough.

Let things pile up.  This is the biggie.  I hate to do things right away, I really do.  The problem is, if things do pile up, I’m less likely to touch them.  It gets overwhelming.  But dusting around piles, or trying to vacuum around stacks?  Who does that?  That’s too much to deal with!

Let the dishes sit overnight.  If I do that, the kitchen will look like a bomb went off in it inside of a week.

I try to obey the thirty second rule.  Basically, if it takes less than thirty seconds, do it right away.  The thing I’m worst about for this is coming home from a long day teaching, and I’m tired.  I often don’t put my materials away right away.  If I have more than one class in the week, this means by the end of the week I’ll have a pile of materials that have become part of the background.  They don’t jump out at me any more, so it may be another week before they’re put away.  This includes things like letting mail I need to deal with piled up “for later”, dropping my gym bag in the corner when I come back tired from a workout, instead of emptying the damn thing and throwing stinky towels in the wash and hanging up a wet bathing suit.  If I do it right away, the house stays clean.  If I don’t, oh my word, the clutter plies.

Is my house “perfect”?  God no!  There’s cat hair on the sofa, the shelves in the kitchen cabinets could do with a good wash,  I can see dust on the piano, there’s a catnip mousie in the middle of the living room floor, the entryway could use a mopping, and the floor of my bedroom closet,would cause me my mother to use the express “rat’s nest”.   Since I do Flylady, I have routines to take care of all those things in the proper time.  She breaks the house into zones for detailed cleaning.  I’ll get to the cathair when we’re in the living room zone, I’ll spend some times on the shelves when we get to the kitchen, I’ll dust tomorrow (I dust on Mondays), I’ll pick up the mousie the next time I get up to go to the bathroom (and drop my coffee cup into the dishwasher along the way), the entryway floor will get mopped when we’re in the zone to do that, and I’ll be spending fifteen minutes a day decluttering the bottom of my closet when we’re in the zone to work on that.

I’ll feel free to follow the maintenance schedule because clutter’s picked up and I don’t feel all stressed about it.  I don’t feel guilty that these things are dirty, either.  Things need to be attended to and a maintenance schedule works just fine.

But, keeping the house clean isn’t about going for that perfect look.  When you keep the house orderly, you rarely get that “OMG, I’ve worked so hard and now the house is all clean and shiny” feeling.   What I do have is a house that doesn’t embarrass me if someone drops by.

And yes, my sink is shiny.

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Afternoon Tea

Because the man of the house teaches at a local college once a week, so really doesn’t have time for a real meal, I serve afternoon tea those nights.  I’ll do up some sandwiches, slice up some fruit and/or veggies, and maybe add a little cheese.  That’s just so we can sit down for a few minutes and he can talk to the boy.  I could make dinner early, but he doesn’t like teaching on a full stomach, so this is what I do.

The cucumber bits are actually cumber slices with some turkey salad between them.  I got the idea from Barb, who came up with them for bento.  Well, her idea was chicken salad, but we had a turkey Monday night, so I figured a poultry salad of some sort would work out.

It did.  Tasty.   I pass the idea on to anyone who might want to have fingerfood ideas that don’t rely on bread.