What you believe in your heart, is what you will do. Take a hard look around your house. What do you see?
Are you a minimalist?
A hoarder?
Is one room always cleaner than another?
Are you frugal or do you overspend? Is it in every area of your life or just one?
If you held up a mirror and looked at yourself, what would you say to yourself about your home, your family and marriage?
What is important to you, you will work on, think on, and spend money on. Everyone is unique, that is why most homemaking/housekeeping schedules don’t work. People are all living in different places, doing different things, with family priorities that don’t match their neighbours. I work full-time, spend my first two to three hours every morning studying, reading, and writing, and when I get home, I put the dogs out, cook dinner, listen to an educational program, do dishes, tidy a little and get ready for bed. On my days off, I clean, bake, sew, shop, weed the garden, preserve food, and those other major jobs that vary throughout the year. For others it might be taking care of a sick relative, running children back and forth to dance class and sporting events, maybe you have a band and spend an evening practicing, or maybe you are a homeschooling homesteader, who needs to go out and feed animals before starting breakfast. A magazine article or book from any era with a housekeeping schedule cannot apply to everyone.
These schedules can be helpful to give you ideas, but you must build your own routine that works for you. To do that, you must know what is important to you and take a realistic view of your life as it is and how you want it to be. What you do today can drastically alter your tomorrow, for better or worse.
I mentioned earlier that my two top values are my faith and family, and when deciding, I filter things through those top values. If you are a single woman, who lives in a downtown apartment, running after a high paying career, and desiring expensive clothing and car, will not have the same top values as a stay at home, homeschooling mom, who wants to grow as much food as possible in her yard.
According to the Oxford dictionary, value means:
1.
the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something.
2.
a person’s principles or standards of behavior; one’s judgment of what is important in life.
Some people value their home more than others. Some people value their job more than others. Some people value themselves more than others. Some people value money more than anything else.
What you do today affects your tomorrow. If you want to change something, start today. Here is an example of what I mean.
- Monday: Grocery and Kitchen
- Tuesday: Laundry
- Wednesday: Bedrooms and Bathrooms
- Thursday: Linens and Living Room
- Friday: Groceries, Defrost Fridge, Dining Rooms & Halls
- Weekend: Free Day/Family Day
There are things you will want to do daily, whether you work outside the home or not; wash the dinner dishes, make your bed, take the meat out of the freezer the night before and tidy the house before bed. Those little 5-minute chores really make a difference done the night before, or in the case of making the bed in the morning.
I just don’t have time for those 1940s and 50s schedules, although I wish I did. Maybe you do, so your house will be much neater and cleaner than mine. However, I am without an excuse to do the best I can with the time I have. If I am lazy, my house quickly turns into a messy, dusty, embarrassing disaster. Did you see that word: LAZY. LAZY is different than overextending yourself, or a temporarily busy time of year. We can’t afford to be lazy. That is a huge part of the problem.
[I want to also state that many of those homemaking schedules are produced to influence the homemaker, not necessarily be the ultimate goal. The ideals of the person who wrote them may not share your ideals and values. Use them as a guide to set up your perfect homemaking schedule and don’t forget to add chores for your children.]
I see this with working women, stay at home moms, and everything in between. Why is there a pile of diapers by the changing table? Why haven’t the dishes been done in three days? Why is there a thick layer of dust on top of the fridge? Simply laziness. I know it is hard to hear, but I am talking to myself as well. We have seasons in our lives where we are just too busy, but these seasons shouldn’t become lifelong habits.
Right now, as I write, I have three spots in my house that frustrate me. They are messy, drop and go spots. Too much stuff. Last year we did a declutter together, and I mentioned, in my posts and book, “Be in Season, Out of SEASON,” that when you declutter, know what season you are in. Why am I hanging onto this stuff? I mentioned I was transitioning from quilting to sewing clothing, but still, I have so much quilting fabric. This is part of the clutter. It is taking up space in the closet that I could be using for things that I am now using. This is awareness. I know what is causing the problem. Now what do I do about it? Be active in finding a solution and do the work, or sit back and allow the problem to continue, which is laziness.
Being lazy means I will be angry at these spots for another year, maybe more. I will be frustrated with these three spots because they are ugly, chaotic and steal my time and energy when I have to get something out of these three spots. I need to take a look at how they got that way, get in there are sort the good and give away, so I can find a solution to solve the problem. As my lifestyle evolves, I will constantly have to revisit my solutions, because things in life change. What I find important in this season might not be a priority in the next.
When you look around your home, discover what the problem areas are, and assess if the problem is clutter and something must go, a proper storage system, (not a clutter hider) or are you just lazy? Lazy is free and easy to solve. Work is instant gratification.
What are some things that you should be doing every day?
What could you be doing in the evenings that you are not doing?
If your children are old enough, what can you delegate? Not because you are too lazy yourself to do them, but to teach your children discipline and how to do certain things.
What is important to you?
Everyone in your family might not be on board with you taking back the domain of the dust bunnies, making everyone bring their dinner plates to the kitchen sink or dishwasher, learning how to wash their own clothes and being assigned weekly chores, but if you step up to lead, and learn to discipline in love and grace, they will follow. The key here is to do what you say you are going to do and do it without complaining. Yelling at someone to do something will create chaos and hurt feelings, so learn to be direct with compassion. If you say you can’t go out on Saturday without your room being clean, don’t let them leave without their room clean. If you say, have the casserole dish in the oven at 4:00 PM at 350 degrees, take the time to send a message as a reminder. And please and thank you goes a long way.
After a week of working on your new schedule and you may find yourself frustrated because you couldn’t get it all done, don’t toss it out, keep working on it. Fine tune it. If you have been working on one room each week to get it thoroughly clean, soon your whole house will be, and you keep at it, it will stay that way. But it will take effort and consistency. You will have setbacks, maybe due to illness, company staying with you, other seasonal priorities come up like gardening, Christmas, renovations, sporting events, etc., and you will feel like you need to start all over again.
Housekeeping is a full-time job. Decluttering is a full-time job. Parenting is a full-time job. All these things evolve and never come back the same way twice. The key to staying on top of it successfully is being active and consistent.
Leave a Reply