Printable House Cleaning Checklists

Back in the good ol' days when I was a full-time mom, I had a little box of 3 X 5 cards separated into daily, weekly, monthly, and semi-annual tasks that needed to be done to keep the homestead from falling into wrack and ruin.  The idea was that you would go through the cards, pull the one at the front of the day's pile, do that chore, then put it at the back of the pile until next time.  It only worked so-so for me because I was fighting a valiant but ultimately futile rearguard against sloth and untidiness, but it was a good idea nonetheless. I came across that card box while moving a few years ago and sighed at the optimism I had that its efficiency would rub off onto my family (it didn't, except for Elizabeth, who has always been tidy and organized).

I see that my current favorite housewife Katie B has updated this idea on her new blog, Housewife How To's, with these printable lists that do the same thing that my little 3 X 5 card box did so many years ago, that is, to keep track of what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, and when it has been done.  If you're a list maker and a chore checker-offer, you might like perusing what Kate thinks you should do to keep your castle in mother-in-law-surprise-visit-oh-my-gosh-what's-she-doing-here spic and span order.  Failing that, you can always frantically try her hints for Crisis Cleaning for Last Minute Guests. :)

Full Disclosure:  I HATE this part of homemaking.  This is why I pay someone else to clean my house for me.  But I wasn't able to afford that until very recently, and I give up a lot of other things to pay for it.

Entropy is Not Always Our Friend

My daughter Elizabeth is a librarian.  Even if she never again works professionally as one in an actual library setting, she is a librarian, which is to say, she cannot long stand disorder.  Add that to her Aspie brain and you get someone who goes ballistic when things aren't organized by the dewey decimal system.

Okay, not really, but it is true that it is highly dangerous to get between a librarian and disorder, as she will trample you without compunction.  This is being abundantly illustrated today with the following photo:

Disorder

What you see here are all the bottles we had in the garage--collected over the last year and more to put our mead, beer, and lambic in.  A while back I went through all of them and put them in orderly stacks in the garage, but that was some time ago and many things have been tossed in the garage since. Bottles were stacked and stashed everywhere, and she couldn't stand all that randomness.

So today she went into the garage and brought out all the bottles she could find.  Here they are on the floor of the dining room, and what she's doing now (I can hear bottles clinking downstairs as I type this) is rooting through all of them, tossing the annoyingly moldy ones into the recycling bin (we are grateful for people saving bottles for us, but if they aren't rinsed, they get way too moldy to bother scrubbing out), and sorting them by type:  still wine, sparkling wine, beer.

We brought 15 gallons of beer to the family reunion, and the fam did a great job rinsing out bottles as they drank the beer.  We were also able to salvage many beer boxes to put our bottles (empty and full) in, ready to make beer for my niece's wedding in August.  The still bottles will be set aside for the mead we have to bottle soon, with more coming later this year as we can afford the honey to make it.  The rest of the beer bottles and the sparkling wine bottles will be filled with the TWENTY gallons of lambic we've had aging for a year or so and is ready to be bottle conditioned--raspberry, peach, cherry, and blackberry.

She also has been organizing the Cupboard Under the Stairs (with apologies to JK Rowling), which is the coolest spot in the house and where we store all our potables whilst aging and after bottling. There are shelves in there that WERE stacked with assorted miscellaneous but are NOW with assorted specific.  This girl is death to entropy, I tell you!

Tonight's summary: 289 beer bottles clean, in taped and labelled boxes, ready to sanitize and fill with beer for Matt and Kristina's nuptials.  Kate the Efficient Housewife would approve, I'm sure.

She'll tackle the wine bottles tomorrow.  Come back for an update!

Housewifehowtos.com

My friend the VK has just launched her new blog, Housewife How-to's and it's awesome already (and it's only the first day!). She's one of those over-edumacated wimmen who actually likes being home with the kids and the dog and the grocery shopping and the Dyson. I so get that, because I'm like that too. If someone offered me seventy grand and bennies to stay home and putter about the house all the livelong day I'd SO jump at it. Make me an offer.

I know a lot of women (and men) who say they'd go crazy staying home and that boredom would soon set in...but not me. I am never bored for more than about ten seconds or so. I always have several irons in as many fires that I can pull out as needed to occupy myself happily and productively. I get great personal satisfaction--a deep intrinsic satisfaction--from making a home. Work just gets in the way.

My mom, God rest her, was not domestic. She had many sterling traits, but domesticity was not one of them (although she was artistic and could sew, knit, and crochet to beat the band). She cooked because she had to feed us, not because she took any particular joy from the preparation of food. My maternal grandmother was the same, although my paternal grandmother was the opposite--and what a shock marriage was to my dad after growing up with his mom. I felt a keen loss growing up with a mom who didn't do girl things with me, and decided early that I was not going to be that way. I wanted to grow up, get married, make babies, and happily take care of all of it in domestic bliss. And I did stay home for most of my children's growing up years, which meant that I raised my own kids, too.

So, yeah. I get Kate.

Anyway, visit her blog, visit it again, and link to it everywhere.