Becoming Domestic

We’ve just come back from an idyllic 4 days away by the seaside enjoying really special cloudless blue skies and warm temperatures but as soon as we got back home I felt so blue by what seemed to be an enormous mountain of chores staring at me from each room.

The kids playroom is looking particularly overcrowded, hectic and messy as do some of the other rooms and I find my self doing one small thing in one room, taking something to where it belongs and then getting distracted by another object out of place and start dealing with this. This is all compounded by the fact I have four days of washing to catch up on, the unused clothes to put away, an empty fridge and HUNDREDS of seeds that really need to be sowed this week!

Luckily the kids are on Easter holidays from pre-school so I can dedicate a few days to getting things straight, surplus clothes & toys identified to take to a charity shop, sowing seeds, doing an online food shop, hoovering, ironing and the like. Luckily I remembered to not feel overwhelmed by it all but to tackle it in a more methodical way than I am naturally inclined to do.

In order to feel like I’m getting somewhere in each room I’m going to set my timer for 15 minutes and do what I can in that time in each room of the house. I’ll grab toys, books, magazines that we have finished with to pass on to someone else, will put toys away where they can be found again and will generally straighten things up. I will do this as speedily as possible and after three 15 minute sessions I’ll have a good sit down with the children and have some fruit and water.

Now I’ve typed this post I’m no longer feeling daunted by it but relishing the challenge of getting it all done before my mum comes to stay on Thursday.

A good friend of ours has a top tip for dealing with post-holiday washing which I don’t need to employ this time but it is an easier option to dealing with the mounds of dirty clothes after a long family holiday. They take the whole lot to the local laundrette and ask for a big service wash. The next day they return to collect clean, dry and folded laundry. This costs less thanone of their holiday meals out. Genius I call it.

Yet another housewifely revelation for this one who is very slowly becoming domestic. I only found out last week that the reason accomplished homemakers do regular dusting is because they had secret knowledge which has been kept from me for 34 years…
Apparently the trick is to do the dusting *before* you can see it. Makes a lot of sense when you think about it. A regular & quick dust in each room will ensure that you never have to tackle the embarassment of unsightly layers of fluffy grey dust on your surfaces especially when an unanticpiated visitor is in your house! How marvellous. Imagine not having the monthly horrors that I have when I realise that every shelf, windowsill and chest of drawers needs to be urgently tackled before a guest writes ‘Clean Me!’ in a prominent place.
According to the very lovely cleaner I USED TO employ the best way for tackling dust is with a barely damp duster cloth.

Squeeze it out so hard that it is practically dry. This then acts like a magnet to all the naughty tiny little particles of (its a bit yucky actually) hair and skin flakes, insect parts, pollen, mold, fungi, lichen, tiny particles of wood, paint, fibers from fabrics such as wool, nylon, rayon, acrylic , plant and vegetable matter, car emissions, heavy hydrocarbon waste from your oil or gas heater, even tiny bits of metal debris from door hinges or any place where metal and friction meet, lots of food waste, and loads of paper fibres instead of just whipping it up back into the air as a dry cloth would.

Absolutely no spray polish is required at all, ever, but occasionally I lovingly rub some old fashioned creamy waxy stuff into the dark wooden furniture we bought back from our Bali honeymoon. It feeds the wood or so I’m told and makes it really shiny.

My friend Rach (already totally domesticated) has discovered that if you line the kitchen waste bucket with a few sheets of old newspaper then the bucket itself stays nice and fresh unlike my slimy stinky bucket which is still recovering from me forgetting to empty it for a few days.

Just take the newspaper and its contents out to the compost heap (or brown bin that the council collects) as a bit of newspaper is said to help the composting process.

Another post which starts with the disclaimer ‘Sorry to everyone who was shown this trick when they were mini and therefore thinks this as being another piece of obvious knowledge’…

But to all the people out there who, like me, weren’t born knowing that the best place to keep the role of bin bags is in the bin itself enjoy revolutionising your least favourite household chore with this lovely tip.

If you keep the role of liners under the liner which you fill up and then remove you will not only save yourself the minor irritation of having to stroll elsewhere to get the replacement (or relying on someone else doing so and them then forgettng to replace the bin bag so you then chuck a whole uneaten dinner into an unbaggged bin) BUT you also get loads of warning as to when the roll is going to run out and need replacing.

Bin bag bonus.

A weekly hour long effort on a Monday cleaning and tidying the house using the following checklist keeps the house pleasant to live in.

I do also do a daily vacuum of room(s) which need it, as well as all the other daily housekeeping tasks (wipe the loo, clean the sinks, do dishes, clean up after food preparation and meal eating)
Each Monday I use the cooker’s digital timer to allow me to spend 10 minutes working on each of the following:

• Empty all waste paper baskets and bins
• Vacuuming - nothing fancy, no pulling furniture around for this just the high traffic areas in each of the rooms
• Dusting - with no polish just a very very well squeezed out duster
• Mop - a quick swish round the kitchen/breakfast room & hall with one mop then a different mop to swish over the wc and family bathroom
• Polish mirrors, pictures and doors
• Get rid of magazines (take to doctors surgery, see if your local library run a ‘magazine swap’), kids drawings (get kids to choose their favourite for the week to go on the wall and send other masterpieces to grandma), post and other papers which have outstayed their welcome.
• Change bedding on each bed

Some of these take less than 10 minutes, others take a little longer but I am usually finished in an hour and back playing with the kids or going on an outing with them before they’ve even noticed.

I tend to pitch in with this list straight after we’ve all had breakfast as I know that I have some time before the first little tummy starts getting rumbly again or the kids have an arguement over a toy.

Rather than thinking ‘Grrr here I am changing the sheets again’ I’ve noticed that I’m a lot more productive and happier if I remind myself how very lucky I am to have a nice house with nice people living in it and how grateful I am to be able to look after everything and everyone in our home.

I had employed a cleaner for the last decade to come to my house twice a week for a total of 5 hours a week in order to vacuum, iron, scrub toilets, wash baths, floors, windows. I had never lifted a finger in my own home and had no idea how to.

After we moved away from London to downshift I read as many books as the local library stocked on home management and soon found out that little and often is the best approach with a general focus on one room or area per week (this works especially well if you can divide your house into approximately four zones so you are then back to the first zone each month).

Setting the timer for 15 minutes and doing some rather than nothing works really well for me as I could easily spend 15 minutes sitting on the sofa thinking ‘Grrrr I’ve got so much vacuuming to do it’s going to take me ages especially as I have to get the vacuum out, plug it in, blah blah blah’. The minute my brain thinks about vacuuming I now set the timer for 15 mins and get going. More often than not I have done LOADS by the time the beeper goes, feel great about my achievement and am back sitting with the kids before they have even noticed I’ve moved.