Does anyone actually enjoy housecleaning?
My flat is generally tidy(ish) but far from sparkling clean. In fact, the only people I know who have sparkling clean homes are those who have someone come in to do this for them. But also those homes somehow never look comfortable or ‘lived in’.
I was moved to write about this as Nog and I are doing a bit of serious Autumn cleaning at the moment, brought about by the gaaaaaaa! factor. Which basically means that the state of the place has made us both go gaaaaaaa! And we have decided that once this is all done we are going to maintain a simple weekly cleaning schedule so that things don’t get so out of hand … you know, kind of a Monday-Friday thing with set chores for each day.
I mean, we always get basic stuff done like laundry, washing up, bit o’ sweeping, basic bathroom maintenance … but things like dusting the bookshelves, cleaning the fridge and kitchen cupboards, dealing with general clutter, etc often get put off.
So, is it just us or do most people put off these sorts of cleaning chores until the gaaaaaaa! factor hits? If you happen to be a very organised housecleaning type person, are there any tips you can offer?
casa azahar 
Our home isn’t sparkling clean, either. I sweep floors a couple times a week, and wash them every other week at the very least, but they really need to be done much more frequently- Herman’s paws are not as white as they should be! Bathroom and kitchen are cleaned daily (except for the bathroom floor, which is done weekly), but stuff like dusting, clearing away clutter from the computer desk, cleaning the fridge, vacuuming the rugs and upholstery, etc, wind up done every other week or once a month at most. The only other thing that is done more frequently is taking trash or recyclables out to the dumpster, which is done at least weekly (when the litter box is changed) but as needed.
Cleaning out the inside of the cabinets, washing all of the walls and inside of windows, cleaning the miniblinds and ceiling fans, and stuff like that, are more of a once-a-year thing.
I wish I were an organized housecleaning type person. I could use some tips myself, so I would stop putting things off and allowing the place to get into such a state. I tend to do everything on weekend mornings, except the kitchen and bathroom, which I do every evening after dinner. I could really use a schedule, which would help me keep things a lot cleaner.
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That said, while I don’t dislike housecleaning, I just don’t have the time to devote to doing it properly. K and I have discussed having someone in to take care of dusting and washing floors and walls and stuff like that, leaving us with just the lighter work and routine tasks like laundry and trash and running the dishwasher. But many of my friends have cleaning people come in, and those cleaners never seem to get stuff really *clean*… not on a regular basis. Our cleaning crew here at the office is really bad, too- they never put the trash and recycling bins back under my desk in the right place. I’d be royally pissed off if I paid someone $50 or more a week to clean, and then I had to follow behind them and fix everything they’d touched.
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Weirdly (or otherwise) I was much better at doing stuff like washing the floors once a week and general cleaning before Nog came to live here – which doesn’t actually make sense as he is really good at doing his share of household chores. Then again, two people sharing a flat make much more of a mess …
“clearing away clutter from the computer desk”
Yeah, I’ve got that one down for my Sunday afternoon job, so I can start the week feeling a bit more organised. 🙄
We don’t actually wash walls, other than the tiled ones in the kitchen and bathroom – in the rest of the flat(painted stucco walls) we use one of those ‘dust-clingy’ dusting things until it’s time to paint again. But not nearly often enough … likewise with washing windows.
And doors! We have those old-fashioned doors with lots of dust-catching ridges that – if we dusted them on a regular basis – wouldn’t need the serious scouring every couple of months (as if we do it even that often!).
And most of our windows are actually balcony doors – 3/4 window with eight small panes and 1/4 wood at the bottom (with dust-catching ridges) and they all have wooden inside shutter doors (with dust-catching ridges) … I mean, it’s endless, the amount of dusting that needs to happen here to keep things CLEAN. Or at least, dust free. Especially as we have six of these balcony window/doors and shutters …
We can’t actually afford to have someone come in to clean properly once a week, but even if we could I’ve heard so many complaints about the cleaner never doing things properly, etc.
So what we are trying to do now is organise this weekly schedule so that we don’t end up going gaaaaaaa! every month or so.
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I don´t think there is anything that can cause so much bad feelings and anger as house cleaning. Most of my life I´ve been living with other people- parents, dorm mates, (ex-)husband and children – and housecleaning has always been one of the main sources of bad feelings and arguments.
I don´t think that I´m “over neat” but I´m usually the one that first go mad… I like to be able to walk with bare feet without stumbling on small rocks or getting stuck in some goo. I prefer bathrooms that are not covered by cat litter and I don´t want to be able to write my name in the dust.
The last year it has only been me and dp, who at 19 must be considered to be a responsible adult. Less fuzz with practical chores I thought… Bah! She has been unemployed the last three months so I actually pay her, not much, to be housewife. She gets some pocket money and I was supposed to spend less time cooking, cleaning and washing. Well, she cooks and do the dishes but we still fight about the house cleaning. I do the bathroom and vaccuum now and then – and the laundry is mine… Occasionally she surprises me and when I come home late Friday evening the flat is done. But most often I must TELL her to do the house cleaning.
I´ve tried schedules when all the kids still were home, but they just vanished away after a while. I´ve tried bribes such as dinner out when “a major house cleaning” has been done. It worked a few times.
For me the main thing is lack of time and tiredness. When Saturday comes there are a gazillion things that must be done, and housecleaning is not always the top priority. This means that I spend far too many Saturday evenings washing floors and doing laundry.
…and next weekend the windows better be washed…
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It’s gotta be much harder to reach a good decision about sharing the housework with kids, dragonqueen.
Part of why our new schedule is a Monday-Friday thing is because we really think we can get all that stuff done during the week – maybe an hour a day for each of us – should be no problem. Though I still reckon the ‘clearing the computer desk clutter’ will always be my own Sunday afternoon job.
Our Saturday mornings are always spent doing little errands and a bit of shopping, wandering about town and maybe stopping for a tapa and a beer before we go home. It’s a nice routine. And then maybe we’ll watch a film on dvd later … I think we’d both like to keep Saturdays free of housecleaning stuff.
Sunday mornings are also rather lazy, but by the evening I’m already thinking about work and what needs preparing, so that would be the best time for me to organise and clean off my computer desk and prepare for my morning classes, rather than scrambling around bleary-eyed at 7am Monday morning wondering where the hell my class notes are for Maria and – dammit – the bloody CD for that listening exercise I’d planned to do with her …
Most Monday mornings Maria shows up at 9am and my hair is still wet and my desk is a disaster and I’ve just managed to pull together the lesson five minutes before she arrived!
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ps
Getting ready for the Monday morning class also means clearing off the crap that has accumulated on the table in our living room over the weekend … often not done until 8.45 on Monday.
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Sometimes there are advantages to living alone. As long as this place is tidy, I don’t worry too much about how clean it is – except the kitchen and bathroom of course. The rest of this place is currently set up as a place to store dust…
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Since I do massage in my home, I feel compelled to try to keep it clean. So, I vacuum regularly, and I clean the bathrooms almost religiously. Keep thekitty litter off the floor, the sink sparkling, even wash the tile walls occasionally. That being said, there are things that do not get done very often, like washing windows. I almost never clean the insides of the cabinets, my logic being they have doors and they don’t get that dirty. (ha ha, that’s a joke)
I tend to dust fairly regularly, but that is because I have quite a lot of very beautiful art that I feel deserves the respect of being kept clean. Since Jim was in teh Navy 21 years and we have travelled extensively, there is quite a collection of really neat stuff. Why ahve it if you arent going to love it a little.
But my desk is stuffed to the gills and the stuffing has overflowed onto the surface. i am in the process of waiting for a new computer desk that has some more drawers, it is supposed to be here next week. Then this one will be moved into a different corner while everything around it gets cleaned, and then I shall have two desks to clutter up. I can hardly wait. (another joke)
What I call “deep” cleaning, like the refrigerator, or washing miniblinds, happens when the Gaaaaaa factor (by the way, I love that term, Azahar) sets in.
There are some places in this house that NEVER get cleaned. Like behind the stereo/ entertainment unit. We have a three layer unit, the bottom shelf has lp records from side to side. This makes it very heavy. Then above that is a shelf with the TV and every electronic stereo and video component known to man (well almost every one). This comes of being married to an electronics technician, we must have all the gizmos. On top of that is the record player and miscellaneous junk including the file of the covers of all the CDs that are in the 400 disc CD changer, and the notebook containing the database on same. Behind this is a rats nest of an unbelieveable number of wires that connect everything to everything else. This has not been cleaned behind since we took it apart a couple of years ago to revamp it to make it tall enough for the new tv. I do not even want to know what is back there, but I suspect it is a lot of dust and cat hair and spiders.
My life is complicated by the fact that I love rocks and tend to collect them. I have them stacked in corners, the truly excellent ones are on shelves where my plants live. These are a pain to dust around, but they are rocks, for heaven’s sake. So why dust them??? I also have shells, and driftwood (which is mostly outside). And there are hundreds of books. Maybe even thousands. I haven’t counted them lately.
I do most of the housework. Jim does almost all the cooking. Sometimes he does dishes. But usually I do. We do not complain to each other about this arrangement. We ahve been together 24 years now, and he does almost all the lawn mowing (with two acres, that is a LOT), and ALL the weed eating. I do not do chainsaw. He also helps with the garden, although I do a lot of the planting. When it is time to process stuff, like freeze green beans or can tomatoes or make chipotle peppers, we work side by side. When the refrigerator decides for some strange reason to stop working, we do the necessary cleaning and defrosting together. Defrosting our two deep freezes (16 cf and 21 cf) is also a team effort.
Don’t ask me how to get organized about housework, I haven’t got the slightest idea. It is on the bottom of my list of things to do; it is a long list and housework is the orphan child.
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(psychocandy>
Our home isn’t sparkling clean, either
Oh c’mooon! We’ve seen the photos! It’s a relative term, of course…but we really must do something about our place. It was a tad embarassing this morning when someone came to repair our tumble drier.
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Actually, I’ve seen those photos too and the place looks pretty damn clean to me. Then again, I don’t have all my spices in alphabetical order with the labels facing out… 😉
I had an embarrassing experience awhile ago when someone came to fix one of the fans in my computer and we had to move the desk out. 😳
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Yeah…but this guy actually told us off!
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Why does everyone (especially az and Edward) tease me about my spice cabinet?
While things are nice and tidy in the photos, there’s stuff you can’t see, and that’s the stuff that frequently makes me go “Gaaaaa!”. Dust that accumulates behind things or up too high for me to get to. And keeping kitty litter off the floor could be a full-time job: that cat is like a furry rototiller in there. And that’s not including when he does somersaults and flips to get out of the box. or when he flings poo out while he’s at it. That REALLY makes me go “Gaaaaa!”
I’ve seen some photos of your place, az, and it looks pretty clean to me, too. Edward, on the other hand… dude, I’d probably tell you off, too. Once I’d pulled the banana peel and pasta curls off the bottoms of my shoes. 😉
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Well, it is my considered opinion that it is possible to be TOO clean. After all, our immune systems work better if they get a little workout now and again.
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Telling people off doesn’t work. Believe me…we do it all the time, and still the banana peels and pasta twists end up on the floor.
I don’t think I’ve teased you as such about your spices….it’s just that I’m content to live with a little serendipity. But you must admit…it is funny! 😉
Did I mention hearing a guy on the radio talking about how some people still manage to thrive in seemingly messy office environments, mentioning to Cath that it was related to my undergrad project…and then realising that it was my supervisor being interviewed? (Programme here. Maaan, that Mariella Frostrup is soooo sexy!). His office resembled the hopper at a wastepaper recycling facility. He changed institutions recently, but he’s told me that my project report was amongst the 5% of documents that he took with him.
(brag)
He also told me that he uses me as an example that ergonomics can attract intellectuals…largely on the grounds that he saw me taking The History of Western Philosophy out of the library after exams had finished.
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I don’t think it’s possible to be “too clean”. Especially in the bathroom and kitchen. A vast majority- I believe the figure is 75% or 80% or higher- of foodborne illnesses are contracted in the home. It’s very important to me not to compromise my immune system- I can’t afford (timewise) to take off work sick. Better to stay clean and healthy, I think.
It would be nice to pay someone to come in and dust and vacuum while I wasn’t home though- it’d do my asthma some good to not be doing that stuff myself or be at home while it’s being done. There’s a local place that’s quite inexpensive- only $20 an hour (with a three hour minimum). I must ask around and see if they do a good job of following directions and putting stuff where it belongs.
I still don’t see what’s funny about arranging a cabinet so things can be found when you need them. I must be missing something?
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PC, this article indicates several studies showing that being too clean contributes to the development of asthma:
http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/Health_Care/asthma_attack.htm
In addition, there is evidence that suggests that the huge polio epidemic of the 30s and 40s was caused largely by a switch to feeding babies sterile formula in sterile bottles. It seems that a baby gets some immunity to polio from its mother’s milk. Then, if it gets exposed to the virus when it is very young and still getting that immunity from Mommy, the polio acts as a mild flu and the kid gets over it, develops a life long immunity. In the 30s, there was a huge shift in the middle class to “scientific” baby raising, middle class babies did not go through this cycle when they were babies because they were fed formula in sterile bottles.. Then when they were older and got exposed to the virus, they developed the devastating and crippling form of the disease. Their mothers were too clean.
I am not trying to say that we should not keep our kitchens clean and avoid conditions where salmonella, which is ubiquitous in the environment, has a chance to incubate from nuisance levels to toxic ones. But itis possible to be too clean, just as it is possible to be too immunized.
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Well, I for one *know* my place is an unholy mess — while in the hospital, several friends took turns coming in to feed my cats for the month I was gone. And I heard *plenty* about it. And, no, I will not go into details.
Believe it or not, I’m actually a *better* housekeeper than my mother. 😕
THAT being said, how can I turn this non-housekeeper into a successful one? Has anyone here ever been in bad shape, and able to reform themselves? I have heard of Flylady.net; even that didn’t help, as I just couldn’t stay with it.
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I have a vague connection to Baroness Helena Kennedy. Her elder sister used to make sure our house was clean.
I heard her talking on the radio once. She said that she’d invited her mother to a posh function wehere she was guest of honour. She was introduced with a long speech lauding her achievements…as a barrister, a campaigner for human rights, a writer, head of The British Council…etc. etc. Her mother piped up:
“Aye…but you should see the state of her skirting boards!”
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I don’t even look at my skirting boards – got enough to worry about as it is. 😉 Like the window panes on all our balconies (and also one in the kitchen) looking all ‘furry’ with dust – ick!
I like the ‘unholy mess’ description, SC! 🙂
That would certainly describe our place.
When I talked about places looking ‘too clean’ I meant those homes that never look like anyone lives there. I have one friend here who has a place like that. There is not a speck of dust to be found anywhere, the kitchen looks like it’s never been used, the living room doesn’t even have the odd magazine or newpaper left out … kinda creepy, to be honest.
Another friend of mine has a similar looking place with regard to the living/dining room area. Looks like it’s waiting to be photographed by House & Home.
But upstairs they have a second living room which is a glorious mess. I reckon they must tell their cleaning woman to never touch a thing on the table as the same stuff is there for months on end, and constantly gets added to.
But since I don’t have two living rooms – and I teach there – I’ve gotta keep it looking at least not too scary!
And PC, the one photo you saw of my living room looking tidy was because it was actually looking tidy that day. And that day only.
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Ah, OK! I’m embarrassed at the photos that I put up on Flickr- the place was a mess that evening- so I’m systematically replacing them with photos taken now the place has been cleaned properly once again.
Is a skirting board anything like a baseboard? I dust those at least once a week. That’s where all the cat hair accumulates. How does it find its way to the edges of the room? Does the air circulation from the aircon/heating move it there, or is it static electricity, or what?
The one thing it looks like you do a lot more regularly than I do, az, is “make” the bed. I only do that on weekends.
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It has been my experience that people who have spotless homes usually have some grave psychological mess going on in their heads. And/or they have NO LIFE. I am thinking of a couple of clients I had when I was doing outcalls. One house looked just like they were ready for the House Beautiful photo shoot every time. The woman was obssessive compulsive living in an abusive marriage.
The best advice I ever received on how to keep your house clean came from a bachelor military vet with PTSD. He said, “Every night when I get home I spend one half hour cleaning in one room. If I do that every night, the house stays clean.” My problem is finding that one half hour every day. You can get an awful lot of cleaning done in a half hour, though, if that is all you do. My advice is, don’t try to carry your glass of wine around while you do it unless it is white wine.
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“The one thing it looks like you do a lot more regularly than I do, az, is “make” the bed. I only do that on weekends.”
Ah, don’t kid yerself. We mostly just haphazardly throw the sheets and (in winter) the duvet and cover back on the bed as they end up half on the floor by morning. Yes, that one photo you saw of ‘the bed’ showed it nicely made up – totally staged for the photo op – the bed almost never looks like that.
Yeah, skirtings are baseboards. I don’t think I’ve ever dusted them in my life, in any house I’ve ever lived in (except before painting) – usually a quick flick of the broom whilst sweeping is enough bother.
az
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“Every night when I get home I spend one half hour cleaning in one room. If I do that every night, the house stays clean.”
Well, this is exactly what Nog and I are trying to do with our latest ‘house chores schedule’. These really do only take about half an hour a day … it’s when you lapse that you end up having do spend ages doing serious CLEANING.
For example, you can either wipe down the kitchen cupboards once a week (half an hour – max!) with a hot soapy dishrag, or spend 3-4 hours! every couple of months with a serious anti-grease product scrubbing down all kitchen surfaces that have become totally gross.
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I’m interested in the reasons why we feel we should have a clean house – apart from the obvious ones regarding serious infectious diseases.
Cleaning my house gives me no pleasure whatsoever: I only do it if I’ve invited someone round – so they think I’m a clean sort of person. In reality, I’m a total slut who would far rather be reading, gardening or faffing about on the internet.
I will clean for guests – because they usually appreciate it – unlike these men I live with 🙄
The time I visited az and Noggin – their house was spotlessly clean – so I always think of them as being clean, tidy and efficient people.
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Just heard back from the maid service, and while $40-$80 a week is perfectly reasonable, I don’t think I’d be able to use them. They insist on using their own cleaning products, and they use typical, everyday stuff. I don’t use any chemical-based or toxic cleaning products, only the all-natural stuff (Ecos, Seventh Generation, etc) they sell at Whole Foods and places like that. Unless I find a service that will utilize my cleaning stuff, we’re stuck doing it ourselves. 😀
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“In reality, I’m a total slut who would far rather be reading, gardening or faffing about on the internet”
😆
I rather enjoy doing those things, too (well, not the gardeining- no garden!). I find that a half hour a day on the kitchen and bathroom, and one hour each day on Saturday and Sunday keeps the place spotless.
It must be rough for those who live with people who see no reason to help out with the house cleaning. I’m so lucky, in that regard.
“It has been my experience that people who have spotless homes usually have some grave psychological mess going on in their heads. And/or they have NO LIFE.”
And it’s been my experience that it’s possible to keep one’s home clean while enjoying a busy and meaningful life. In fact, it’s been my experience that the total slobs I’ve known have been the ones with the psychological problems. My parents house is a mess- as within, so without, I guess.
I never “got” house cleaning for house guests. Visitors tend to overlook dirt and clutter that I can plainly see.
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“The time I visited az and Noggin – their house was spotlessly clean – so I always think of them as being clean, tidy and efficient people.” (Teuchter)
Well yeah! That’s cos we knew you guys were coming – and we only did a slapdash last minute cleaning thing (quite funny with both of us running around with dusters and cleaning rags in our hands!) but if it looked fine to you … well, actually, that probably doesn’t mean much does it? 😉
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“Cleanliness is next to…impossible.”
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Yeah but … furry window panes?
I always like to think that visitors won’t notice such things but then I am terrified that they might want to use the bathroom!, which also means dealing with the cat box beforehand.
To be honest, if it weren’t for visitors I wouldn’t give a flying fuck about what my place looked like … but I also have to teach classes in my living room ( forpaying visitors no less! ) and what if they want to use the bathroom??? I mean, it’s really all too much.
Going to lie down now . . .
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I have spent many hours cogitating on whether or not it would be possible to train Mike and Smokey to clean the bathroom when they use it. AFter all, they are all furry, wouldn’t they make a fine dust mop? They life their heads in disdain from their comfortable place ensconced on the bed and sneer in my general direction at the very idea.
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I’m with you, Psychocandy. We have friends that suffer from environmental allergies and all the cleaning products in my home are Seventh Generation Free and Clear. I can’t believe that the maid service wasn’t willing to use your products, that just doesn’t make sense since it would save them money on your job since you would be providing the products rather than them. Oh well, no accounting for people, sometimes.
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Of course, there’s also an element of sexism in the whole housework thing. Keeping a tidy house is meant to be a signifier of femininity. Note that we use the same word for an untidy woman as for a promiscuous one.
I think a lot of women internalise this. The house comes to represent the body. To see the house messy is to see the woman naked (and without makeup…etc. etc.) With men it’s cars…cutting in on a man on the motorway is tantamount to cuckoldry.
I generalise, of course. I don’t hold much truck with the ‘Men are like this, women are like that’ way of thinking. And, hell…give me a slut any day!
(Note also that if a man does housework or cooking he gets heaped with praise for being a New Man! If a woman does them…well, that’s just normal.)
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(Psychocandy)
It’s been my experience that the total slobs I’ve known have been the ones with the psychological problems.
Aye! I have three psychological problems. 🙂 I’ll admit that I’ve never been a naturally tidy person, but I do make the effort. It’s just soul destroying that three kids can undo it all within half an hour…especially when it’s already taken five times as long as it should to tidy, in between demands for juice, breaking up fights, inane questions…Plus we have three extra sets of washing and ironing to do, and if the clothes aren’t out of the way, you can’t even begin to tidy!
Stick to cats! They may kick their shit onto the floor from time to time, but they’re far less hassle!
(I don’t mean it. Children are far cuddlier).
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So far, the votes seem to be that if you are messed up psychologically you are likely to be either a complete slob or psychotically clean. So what seems to be normal is to have enough of a life to have almost enough time to get a really clean house most of the time and the rest of the time one lives in sort of healthy clutter.
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I agree with that! 😀
But I have to say that as much as I tease Edward about clutter, I can imagine how soul-destroying it would be to spend the time to clean up only to have it trashed again within a half hour.
I don’t really have a frame of reference for that so all I can do is sympathise.
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I was once one of those soul destroying children, I suppose. When I was 3 or so, the rule was we were to put our toys on shelves in our rooms before we went to bed. My older sister and I shared the room, and so we would do this task in between my bath and her bath. My mother tells me that quite often I would systematically pull all the toys out of the shelves while B. was in the bath. Go figure.
When you have babies and toddlers, you just do the best you can and know that they will eventually grow up and become teenagers. Oh wait, is that an improvement?
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Edward “Note that we use the same word for an untidy woman as for a promiscuous one.”
Now THAT is an insightful comment! Women get trashed if they do or they don’t…clean, put out, whatever! 😉
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Och…the kids aren’t so much soul destroying as exasperating. They do take up a lot of what childless people would call ‘free time’, though. It really is hard to imagine the way they take over your life (in a good way!…honest). Today, for example, will be filled by ironing, a visit to the Theatre (kids show with the great John Hegley) and acting as a taxi service between various parties.
Some of our friends with kids do manage to keep tidier houses. And they even manage the odd night out together. These tend to be the ones who have active parents of their own. We have only one parent left between us, and although he’s in a (very good) home, we still have to give time to him. Certainly we were a lot tidier when we had a human dynamo of a childminder.
Hell..people’s lives are all different. There’s a difference between our kind of situational untidiness and the “Mummy’s asleep on the kitchen floor again” squalour that Cath used to meet in her job…even if they look the same to the untrained eye. (We don’t have empty beercans and charred pieces of tinfoil littering the floor, though. Usually.)
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Now THAT is an insightful comment!
I only express feminist views so I can get off with laydeez, of course. 😉
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I suspected as much, Edward! 😆
Most kids are a pleasure to be around, and some are little monsters. Kind of like grown-ups, really. Oddly, I have more “patience” for childish “messes” than with some purely adult squalor.
I once had friedns (adults in their fifties with no children at home) whose house was such a mess you literally had to wade through it and cut a path from room to room. I think that goes beyond untidy or too busy to clean regularly and goes right into pathologically sloppy. And some people force their children to exist in that kind of situation.
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I mentioned male territoriality over cars earlier. I’ve just had An Incident. At traffic lights, I had to speed up to come in front of someone on the ‘wrong’ side, so I could avoid parked cars. He didn’t like this one bit. He was behind me another two miles, which he clearly resented – he was driving pretty close. Eventually he pulled level as I was turning off and he looked at me and made the usual “wanker” signal.
I did what I normally do in these situations. I looked him in the eye, gave a suggestive kiss and licked my lips enticingly.
(Thread drift. That’s nothing to do with cleaning)
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You slut! 😉
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Spacecadette mentioned Flylady – Milla posted a link to that recently. I took one look and backed out screaming. It requires actually being at home, a luxury that I only enjoy at the weekends, and being able to move and lift stuff – something that I can only do for a few hours a day with my back.
Our house is a terrible mess – almost to the state where you have to wade through things to get to things.
In Germany we don’t seem to have so many hours a day to do stuff, and houses are very large. We inhabit four floors – all the rooms in the basement and the roof are rooms in their own right, with walls, floors, tables, chairs, stereos etc – except for the boiler room.
Despite the general chaos, I really enjoy cleaning and spend my weekends, when I am fit enough to do so, cleaning the kitchen and the bathroom (kitchen takes about 3 hours, bathroom up to an hour). I manage to get the washing done at the weekend and after taking three weeks off work recently, I have now managed to get the ironing down to a single basket.
Lots of these new inventions really are good and make cleaning quite enjoyable, especially when you can produce shiny taps or gleaming ceramic hobs without the use of chemicals.
Soon I hope to be able to get around to the living room. But this weekend was eaten into by a wedding this afternoon.
The “half hour a night and an hour at the weekends” that Psychocandy describes fascinate me. It would take me fifteen minutes to gather all the bits and pieces I needed, and then at least an hour or so to tidy any room before I could even start cleaning. By which time someone would be clamouring for a meal or it would be time to go to choir practice, so the whole thing gets left for a further three weeks, now with added vacuum cleaner, dusters, brooms, buckets etc.
As for the psychological side… my mother has always kept a spotless and tidy house, (but not of the uncomfortable kind), with absolutely no effort. Somehow, in my house, absolutely no effort produces a frightening amount of filfth, dust and piles of books, magazines, and washing that is ironed but not put away.
We were never taught or expected to do any housework. So I am constantly frustrated that my house isn’t as nice as my mother’s, although she never seemed to have to work at it.
Even now, at 86, she has a perfectly run household, light and airy, modern, clean, and a meal on the table at the proper time three times a day.
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Honestly, Flylady is pretty good. Her motto is “I can do anything for 15 minutes”, and “It didn’t get messed up in a day, so it’s not going to get clean in a day.”
And, she’s right, I *did* make progress. Problem was, I don’t own a car, live by myself and any errands that need doing usually take place after work. After trucking home items and groceries by bus, I’m pretty beat and count it a miracle if I can actually cook myself dinner instead of nuking a snack. Baseboards be damned.
I haven’t gotten much done lately, but I’ve got a good excuse, really I have… 😉
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Update … seems our new ‘list of stuff to do every day of the week’ has so far ended up with them being done every other week. Well, mostly. 😕
But we’ve decided that we’re totally going for it starting Sunday evening (with the bookshelf dusting and clearing off computer table stuff).
We’re a bit ahead of the game at the moment as we’ve spent the past week reorganising said bookshelves (eep!) and the work area next to my computer table. The only things littering my computer desk at the moment are a couple glasses of cava and an ashtray … 😉
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