A Healer’s Geste

Keeping House — A Grounding

In this chapter, the author spends some time developing the theme of home as found in the Bible and fleshing out a bit of what a home is and contending that households established by single folk are just as legitimate as those set up by married families. Since Willa covered this already, I will proceed to my own ramblings.

So in the last chapter, she established that having a kept house matters. Here, now, she contends that keeping a house matters — that is, the menial work itself is valuable, and not simply the effect.

At one point she gives this example:

One lifestyle magazine quotes a woman who said of a particular point in her life that she had decided from then on to spend as little time as possible “doing things that just don’t matter.” The result? “I haven’t had my head in a toilet since.” I doubt, however, that this woman’s toilet has gone uncleaned in the intervening years. I suspect that someone else has been cleaning it, someone whose role in life, her employer imagines, is to do work that “doesn’t matter.”

Now, since the person in question was someone a lifestyle magazine was interviewing, she’s probably right, this is probably someone who has hired out her housework. However, my initial response to her response was a snort. It is clearly the response of a “cleanie” who can’t imagine using or having a gross bathroom. Ha.

I, however, have been at the “doesn’t matter” point myself, and the result was not that I hired out the housework, but that I did as little as I could get away with. So, the back, non-public bathroom of our home was absolutely atrocious and terribly embarrassing. I hardly noticed, since I had decided it didn’t matter. Then one day a friend came to visit and just before she arrived, the toilet in the main bathroom stuck and wouldn’t flush. Not thinking things through, I simply shrugged and thought that since this friend lived only down the block, she probably wouldn’t need to use the bathroom. Still, I served plenty of coffee and water. To my horror, she asked if she could use the bathroom. I apologized that it was out of order. She pressed the matter. I had to stammer that yes, there was another bathroom she could use, if she could climb over my mound of clothes to get there and would still be willing to use it once she saw it. Thankfully she was an understanding soul who had been at that place herself, and it didn’t seem to phase her, though I felt mortified. Indeed, that might have been the initial catalyst for my change. It opened my eyes to how I was living.

Now, back to the book, pretending I never told you that I have been and can be content living in squalor, at least in the back and private corners. We shall return to the author and try not to mock or resent her Cleanie heart. No, remember, that’s where we are trying to get ourselves, even if it comes hard for us.

So, what are some good things about housework? What are some reasons we might choose to do our own housework, even if we could afford a maid service? Something beyond being too frugal, too cheap, to do so?

1. “The rhythms of housework also provide a way to resist the relentless 24/7 pace of modern life in favor of something more suited to human embodiment and relationality.” So, it grounds us in the rhythm of Real Life.

2. When we teach children to do housework, “we encourage the child to see himself as a worker and contributor to the economy of the household.” And if we want our children to think housework is valuable, then we need to think and act like it is valuable. I think she forgot that some of us are still trying to convince ourselves, much less the children.

3. Housework is creative, transformation, repetitive work that pictures God’s own.

4. Housekeeping exemplifies faithfulness and providential, sanctifying care.

5. By performing these duties, we mirror God’s own work: it is physical and real, it is transformative, it gives grace, it is meticulous and all-encompassing, it is humble and sacrificial service. It is a way given to us to imitiate, to symbolize, God’s own work, to image Him as He created us to do and be.

Being an overthinking type, these philosophical-type reasons resonate with me more than the practical, physical, more obvious reasons. However, I believe that is a gnostic weakness and temptation. I have long lived believing that the inside can be clean without that affecting the outside. The outside is rather irrelevant. I am slowly coming around to seeing that what is inside works itself out to the outside. People cleansed by grace should grow into being clean and gracious in all they do and all they are. That is sanctification.

And that includes housekeeping.

Securing a Reasonably Clean House: Maintaining an Even Keel

Here are Auntie Leila’s rules for not getting to that overwhelmed stage quite so quickly or frequently. Personally, my current practice involves maybe a third of her rules, and several of them I’m still kicking against. I am in the process of acquiring mats, though!

Confine Mess

1. Children keep toys in limited areas and do not get free range of the entire house and all its contents. Keep the living room a room free from trashing.
2. Establish boundaries for toys & activities.
3. Mobile infants & toddlers can spend happy playtimes in a pack n play several times a day.

Corral Dirt

1. There must be industrial mats at every door.
2. Shoes off at the door. No excuses.

Meal Time Rules

1. Children help set the table and get ready for each meal.
2. Children eat at the table only. Ever.
3. Napkins and dishes and table manners are used during each meal, even if it’s only 8 minutes.
4. Mom sits at the table for all meals, also. “If your own mother won’t eat with you, who will?”
5. Keep it cheerful and consider playing an audio book while you eat.
6. Children can keep their hands and face clean while eating.
7. Children should receive permission to be excused before leaving the table.
8. Children should clear their place, scraping off their plates and loading them in the dishwasher.
9. Children should wash their hands before & after eating.
10. Eaters in high chairs should not be let down before being wiped down with a warm cloth; then use that cloth to wipe down the chair.

Kitchen Rules

1. Set up a work flow
2. If it’s pretty or really useful, it is ok to give it counter or wall space where you use it. Do your best to store things at their point of use. (Leila’s version allows for the cottage cluttery look, which most organization books scold you out of).
3. Put incoming stuff on the kitchen table, where it must be dealt with by the owner before mealtimes. Never move or put temporary things on the counters, where they will be shoved and left and ignored. Remind everyone to come out their stuff anyway before the meals.
4. Clean as you go: start with clean counters and an empty dishwasher and empty sink, stick things back in their place or into the dishwasher when you have a waiting moment in the process, use bowls and utensils in ‘hygienic order” rather than dirtying multiples, and before sitting down to eat, leave dirty dishes in a sink of warm water and put ingredients away and wipe down the counters.

Bathroom Rules

1. To the extent you can, attempt to have easy-clean materials in your bathrooms.
2. Clean the bathroom while the children bathe.
3. Keep your cleaning supplies in the bathroom (each bathroom?), so it’s quick and easy and convenient to get it clean.
4. Don’t use a bucket for cleaning the bathroom, stop up the sink and use it, cleaning it last. Personally, I use a spray bottle with cleaner, so I don’t get why I’d need a bucket or a sinkful of water.

Thinking it Through

So, which of these do you already do? Which would you like to argue with? Which might you think about incorporating?

Both Matt and I are shoes-on-all-the-time people, and we live in a dry climate, so I’m not going shoeless in the house. But, I am working on getting mats for all our doorways and I’m even considering the sit-down-with-the-kids-for-each-meal. It might be one of those areas where it ends up giving more than it takes in the end.

Keeping House — Ye Do It Unto Me

This week Willa’s online book club is covering the first half of the first chapter, “What is Christian about Housekeeping?” Willa’s post is a good summary, so I will jump into a rabbit trail on the first section of the chapter, and hope someone else picks up the thread of the second section, dealing in broad strokes with the history and sociology of housework.

The author opens with what was for me a somewhat disappointing line: “I have always enjoyed keeping house.”

One wants to identify with the author of this sort of work. To hear, Once I was like you, but now I am so much better — and I’ll show you how to be better, too! Or, at least, I do. It’s my temptation to look for the next idea that will bring on, finally, some arrival instead of this very slow and plodding and undulating progress. Perhaps, however, this author will key us in to the psychology of someone who enjoys keeping house. However, she does say that cleanliness is the part she is slack in, so perhaps we can like her anyway.

Personally, I have always wanted a home to keep. I never wanted a career. I have only ever wanted a home and family to tend. I’ve never questioned that it is worthwhile. Whenever I think of that I am flooded with gratitude that God gave me a husband and home so early, so that I didn’t have to find some random job or feel obligated to pursue a career. I married a marvelous man who believes it is worthwhile and would work round the clock if necessary in order to keep me home (that is, to make it not necessary for me to work; he has no objection if I happen to be able to make income. That hasn’t happened since #4 came, and what I got from tutoring and teaching beforehand was never much). So perhaps I am closer to the author’s starting point than I had originally thought. I wanted to cook from an early age, and by the time I was 10 or 11, I cooked dinner one night a week for our family of 8-and-then-9. I loved it.

However, I hated to clean my room. My version of cleaning my room was to dump my clothes in the laundry or shove them under my bed, put the random junk on my sister’s bed for her to deal with, then alphabetize my bookshelf. I enjoy organizing. I hate cleaning. I dislike laundry. I sigh at dishes to be done. I delegate dishwasher duties to children because I feel such things are beneath me. I feel imposed upon by the housework, but I love the house and the family. I would find it a terrible drag to have to go to a job after being mistress of my domain. I am not quite sure how the two fit together. I think they only fit together if I was an old school landed aristocrat with household help. Really, love of the home and hatred of cleaning the home can’t coexist. They are inconsistent. Perhaps that sense of the inconsistency of my affections has been the impetus to my ten-year-and-counting quest to conquer this beast.

So. Let’s continue the quest.

Homekeeping’s Primary Goals

I understood [during that crisis], with a clarity that I have experienced at few other times in my life, that getting to the grocery store was one of the things that Really Mattered.

Forget fantasies about “accomplishing something.” [...] I measured my my days by whether, at the end of them, the members of my household had been dressed and fed and bathed and put to bed. If we had been, then that was a good day. I had done what mattered most. Everything else was gravy.

Personally, I found this quote and thought clarifying and relieving. I read this chapter a week ago, and since then, I have several times found myself feeling pangs of regret over this or that that I didn’t get to, and I have remembered this thought and realized that the time spent on laundry and food was not interfering with those other goals, but were the primary goals for my day. Perhaps I have considered them so basic as to not count anymore. Clothes, food, discipline, food, talking and listening, food, stuff, food, laundry. Yeah, yeah, yeah — boring — but what project did I get to?

Dressed + Fed + Cleaned + Put to bed = Success. We should add “Loved” into that equation to cover a multitude of sins, but wow, what a concept. Those things count as the main deal. All that time spent on food is not a small matter, after all.

However, can we strike the implication of daily bathing of the members of the household? Thank you. I am not ready for that one.

But I retained the long-held sense, of which I had been made so consciously aware during those difficult years of illness, that housekeeping — cooking, cleaning, laundry, all the large and small tasks that go into keeping a household humming along — was not a trivial matter but a serious one. People need to eat, to sleep, to have clothes to wear; they need a place to read, a place to play, a place into which to welcome guests and from which to go forth into the world. These are the needs that housework exists to meet.

It is the reading and the projects and the welcoming guests that I have counted as “accomplishing something.” The work that it takes to get there has been, in my mind, the unfortunate reality. A little tending is lovely. That all things tend toward entropy, however, is just a little more than I can cheerfully take. But if I fully recognize and readily admit that people need to eat, sleep, and wear clothes, that they need to read and play and work, that we need to sally forth and welcome in, then housework is the initial step toward all those things, not something to get out of the way before moving on to them. It is the beginning of reaching those very things. Without housework, those things can’t happen. If those things are the goals, then the housework is at least part of the means. If then, they are worthy goals, surely the means might also be worthy?

Housekeeping as Service

There is a tendency, I think, on the part of those of us who are well fed, clothed, and housed, to imagine that the needy people to whom Jesus refers in Matthew 25 [the least of these] are people we don’t know — the sort of people who are served at homeles shelters and soup kitchens, at which we ought therefore to volunteer at least occasionally. But housework is all about feeding and clothing and sheltering people who, in the absence of that daily work, would otherwise be hungry and ill-clad and ill-housed.

There is undoubtedly more to the merciful service that Jesus describes in Matthew 25 than caring for the daily needs of the members of our own households. Housework is a beginning, not an end. But it is a beginning — not a sidetrack, not a distraction, but a beginning, and an essential one at that — in the properly Christian work of, among other things, meeting the everyday needs of others.

Here is the crux of the matter. It is no small thing to feed and to clothe and to house and to love the little ones, the least of these, that God has entrusted to our personal care. Their being biologically related does not diminish the value of caring for and serving them. In fact, it merely increases the responsibility, duty, necessity. This is the avenue where the connection between housework and ministry, between duty and calling, between mundane and spiritual. I think it is easy to be gnostic in thinking that such things as grocery shopping and sweeping floors do not really “count” as loving people. But no food in the pantry and sticky and crumb-crusted floors are precisely a disservice to them, so would not caring for such things be a positive service?

And that not only for the other members of the house, but even for oneself, lest we stray too close to martyr syndrome. Even in a single-member household, food and clothes and cleanliness matter, in order for the sallying forth, the welcoming in, and the reading, playing, and working to happen.

This home and these duties are the starting point of our Christian duty of charity, of love, of caring, of service. For ourselves, for our families, and for our community. Certainly that reveals the duties’ value and worth.

Securing a Reasonably Clean House: The Blitz

Previously, on Securing a Reasonably Clean House

Introduction
Initial Steps & Secrets
Zones

From Leila

The Blitz

1. The Reasonably Clean, Fairly Neat, and Comfortably Tidy House.
2. A Pep Talk for Organization.
3. In which I give you a secret to get you started on The Reasonably Clean House.
4. The Moderate Clean. Two secrets to keeping your house on track.
5. Basic Cleaning Tools

What is the Blitz?

Your aim is not so much to clean…

…as to give the appearance of clean.

“The blitz enables you to live a real life with the sure knowledge that you can whip things into shape in fifteen minutes.”

The blitz is a lightening strike on a room that has been reasonably maintained (in other words, not a room in need of a deep clean but simply one that has endured three nano-seconds of kid-exposure).

When is the Blitz?

Choose one of these two optimum times:

1. After breakfast but before starting school.
2. “Second, [just before] the hours between 4 and 6 pm, or whenever meltdown coincides with Dad’s return from work.”

Isn’t nice to know other people experience that, too?

Steps to the Blitz

We’ve been doing something like Leila’s blitz for almost a year now, calling it EHAP (Everything Has a Place). For some reason, often when I say EHAP I think hazmat, which usually doesn’t seem too far off-base. However, Auntie Leila here has some tips that address problems we’ve had with EHAP, all the good its been notwithstanding.

1. Always, always start at one end of the room and move around; always, always start at the edges and finish with the center.
2. Assign picker-uppers for categories of stuff: books, blocks, garbage, toys, socks (what?! socks?!). Assign a little one the job of gathering junk from corners and under furniture and cushions and putting it in the center of the room. Or, just assign “finders” and “put-awayer,” where the finders pile stuff on a table or in the center and the put-awayers, well, put the stuff away.
3. Put throw pillows in place, neaten horizontal surfaces, and have a child do a quick sweep or vacuum of the traffic area.

Give the children 15 minutes to do this in one room, whether it be through the imposed deadline of a timer or a hard deadline like a television show (is this still considered a hard deadline these days?). With enough children, and when they get old enough, you could have two teams each doing a room while you do another. Until then, we’ll have to settle for 30 minutes of EHAP/Blitz. Still not unreasonable for mom or kids, though; a small price for a mostly, reasonably, consistently clean house.

But, remember, first they have to be trained in the process, and then they still have to be inspected. Emphasize that “the room can’t even pretend to be clean until the edges are at least clutter-free.”

Tips for the Blitz: Atmosphere

Here we have one of my favorite Leila quotes:

So you want an atmosphere of light-heartedness — gaiety even — not uncharged with peril.

You achieve the light-heartedness by your attitude and demeanor, and by turning up some “rollicking” music.

The peril comes in by the timer and knowing “that if they aren’t going to pitch in, bad things will happen to them.”

At the same time, “they have to believe that this is all great fun. They have to understand that we’re all in this together and our environment matters.”

So:

1. Timer — this is as much for the children as for you. For you, it charges the atmosphere and gets people moving. For them, they know this job will end and you won’t keep adding to it at your whim.
2. Music — loud, upbeat, fun music.
3. Teamwork — this is not adversarial or competitive, this is everyone working together toward a common end.
4. Consequences — add some real danger to not participating fully and cheerfully. Ensure that you participate fully and cheerfully, also.

And, finally, don’t let things fall into “cleaning fail”:

Now, the well trained household can accomplish the blitz without you (note, not the deep clean, or even sparkle and shine — they might be able to do it once, but not twice in a row), IF and only IF you’ve drilled them in starting with making sure corners are cleared.

Otherwise, they will quickly catch on to the Pseudo-Blitz, which involves shoving everything away from the center of the room into the corners — a bona fide housekeeping disaster. Everyone needs to learn that the room can’t even pretend to be clean until the edges are at least clutter-free.

and

“Nothing says ‘cleaning fail’ like a vacuum left out.”

Ouch!

Personal Notes

I’ve been doing a week or week and a half now of Leila’s version of afternoon tidying. It has been a smashing success! We do the main level and then alternate doing the downstairs (school/playroom) and upstairs (bedrooms). With only one day’s mess accumulated and with the teamwork and upbeat attitude, we’ve had all our blitz done in 15 minutes!

One of my ways of adding “peril” is by doling out the consequence of doing the job all by oneself if you

1. Boss, or tell someone else to pick up if you aren’t.
2. Complain about the job.

It seems to have sunk in to the child who needed it the least, and not to the primary offender. But, then I remind the offender that if they complain about the consequence, then what they need is practice working cheerfully, and I will gladly give them the opportunity for practice, by adding on another job for each complaint. Oh, and the policy is that you can’t eat until you’ve finished your work (it’s biblical), so one wants to be careful how many jobs are added on at 4:30pm.

But that situation hasn’t come up in the new regime yet, but happened every now and again when they were simply sent to clean up a room, and an hour later had made little to no progress. With me in the room doing the training and supervising and lending a hand here or there (or at least an eye that can see toys in the middle of the floor), we’ve made record time. I assign my 3yo girl to “find toys that are trying to hide” (she has amazing vision when it comes to picking up, especially when she doesn’t have to put them away, but only toss them in a bucket for the boys to put away), and the boys have to put the toys gathered in their right places. Any object I find not put in the right spot I toss back in the bucket or add to my stash of hostage toys.

The real magic, I think, is focusing on the corners and edges. It makes a huge difference in the appearance of the room.

Try it.

More on Zones

So, here’s the question: Is it better to have a big cleaning day or to clean a little bit every day?

My point of reference for answering this question is laundry. With laundry, too, you can have a big laundry day or do a little every day (though once your family gets large enough, it’s more like every day is a big laundry day). I did the big laundry day for years, mostly because I detested laundry. I wanted to get it all out of the way at once and not think about it for the rest of the week.

The problem was that it actually never happened that way.

I’d get most of the loads done in one day, but I’d never get them all put away in one day. And then there’d always be some load during the week that had to be done. So, the way the reality worked out, I still had laundry hanging over my head all week, but I held my ground, firmly resisting the pile-guilt by insisting that it would have to wait for Laundry Day. And so often it became more and more backlogged, until I’d have to have a Nothing But Putting Away Laundry Day.

Then we put the house on the market. Baskets and piles of clothes hanging around constantly was no longer an option. So I made myself move to a load-a-day plan, because clearly the weekly day was not working for me. I haven’t gone back to the one-day-a-week plan.

It can work, as long as your total number of loads can be done in one day, but it means you have to be remembering and doing it all day, to get the clothes cycled through. And it means a lot of time folding and putting away in one day. If that works for you, then by all means go with it. I don’t think one should chuck a system that’s working.

However, I found that in doing a little bit every day, “doing laundry” became much less of a dreaded task. It takes 2 minutes in the morning to start a load, 1 minute to change loads, and 10-15 minutes to get it all put away real quick. No marathon sessions, no mounds of laundry (dirty piles in hampers or clean piles in baskets), and no dread. I don’t like laundry, but now I merely shrug, instead of waking up sighing, breathing deeply, and saying, “Ugh. Laundry Day.”

I believe it’s the same way with housework. It never gets too bad, it never takes too long, if you just do some every day. 30 minutes every day is easier to fit in, even around interruptions, than 2 hours straight.

Remember that with Leila’s zone plan, your 20-30 minutes of cleaning includes putting things away, and is only dusting and vacuuming or mopping without moving anything. Again, it’s a small, bite-sized amount that can just be tackled quickly and relatively painlessly, whereas 1-2 solid hours of such tasks is dreary. And, for me, simply doesn’t work well, because I easily talk myself out of at least half of what I should do, and life happens and can derail a whole day. If the derailed day is Laundry Day, then there’s a big problem. If the derailed day is Cleaning Day, it can get bad.

When I have assigned large tasks one to a day, I have inevitably gotten behind and way off track in no time. Laundry doesn’t get done all in one day, so it trickles into other days, so that day’s tasks get pushed back, and the ball of chaos begins to roll. On top of that, if I have mentally reserved Monday as Laundry Day, then I feel resentful if I have to do laundry on other days. If Thursday is my cleaning day, then Tuesday when the house is a wreck, I will pick up a book and haughtily tell the house, “I will see to you on Thursday.” If I do a little bit every day, then I get more things to check off quickly, and I have mentally accepted that it is the day’s tasks. I have much, much less resentment toward my housework on a “little bit every day” plan.

Each individual’s mileage may vary, especially someone who doesn’t have the personal issues and hangups I do.

I’d love to continue the conversation in the comments, though!

Securing a Reasonably Clean Home: Zones

Previously

Introduction
Initial Steps & Secrets

From Leila

1. The Reasonably Clean, Fairly Neat, and Comfortably Tidy House.
2. A Pep Talk for Organization.
3. In which I give you a secret to get you started on The Reasonably Clean House.
4. The Moderate Clean. Two secrets to keeping your house on track.
5. Basic Cleaning Tools

Establish Zones

Zones. Most housecleaning strategies seem to incorporate this idea in some form. A “zone” is one manageable area of your home you focus on at a time, be that time one day a week or one week a month. In Leila’s set-up, a zone is assigned to each day, Monday through Friday or Saturday.

So, assignment #1: What 5-6 divisions make sense for your home’s layout?

Mine are Kitchen & Breakfast Room, Bathrooms & Mudroom, Living & Dining & Entry, Office & back closets, Bedrooms, and Playroom/School room.

Step #2: Assign each of these rooms to a day of the week.

If you are decluttering or regaining control in any of these areas, then the assigned day of the week is the day you focus your extra cleaning time on that area. Have you ever focused on mastering one area of the house and while doing so the rest of the house falls to pieces and you end up not one bit ahead? Yeah. Me, too. What I have to give up is the idea that maintenance can’t be begun until complete control and order is achieved in the main rooms. If, instead, maintenance is something you work on first and daily, with extra time being doled out around the house, the progress might seem slower but it is actually real order and control and not cyclical booming and busting. It is order being marched along progressively throughout the house instead of being lost in 2/3 of the house while 1/3 of the house is the focus.

Steps to Weekly Zone Cleaning (the “Moderate Clean”)

1. Get a helper, a runner, so you don’t leave the room or lose your focus. Set yourself to move quickly. Peppy music?
2. Start at the door and go around the room in one direction; no bits and pieces here and there.
3. Move everything that does not belong out into the middle of the room or straight into its place.
4. Wipe down surfaces with a damp rag. This is the quick clean, so don’t worry about moving everything. Use a damp rag or a feather duster, but just wipe down visible surfaces.
5. Toss the random stuff into a basket and put it out for kids to claim and put away. If no one claims it or it hasn’t earned a home, does it need to stay?
6. After you’ve gone around the room and dealt with the stuff in the middle, vacuum around the edges, then the middle.

What would happen if you did this every week in each room? Wouldn’t that be something?

If you aren’t in a place where this can happen in a room in 30-40 minutes, then I think it’s still a good method, but do a quarter of a room at a time or 15-30 minutes at a time, picking up the next week where you left off.

Having a plan of attack does help tremendously. I hate staring at a room thinking, “Boy, it needs a lot of work. I have no idea where to start.”

Being able to clean the zone in this way once a week in a reasonable amount of time depends upon the daily blitz, which will be next week’s subject.

Steps to Deep Zone Cleaning

Mentally divide your home into zones, and deep clean only one zone at a time, maybe once a month.

Step 1: Schedule one extra “deep cleaning” hour per week.

Step 2: Spend that hour in one zone. You’ll then hit each zone deeply approximately once a month.

Follow the same routine as in the moderate clean, with these exceptions:

1. Take everything off every surface, wipe down the surface, then put back only what you want there.
2. Make sure and clean the windows, door, trim, light fixtures, and anything else that might collect cobwebs.

If the room isn’t a wreck to begin with, since it gets the weekly moderate clean and a daily blitz, then this isn’t a giant chore. It’s just something to buckle down and do so that it doesn’t return to squalor and chaos, bit by bit.

Now, that’s not real, big-time, deep cleaning, about which Leila says,

Tip: do your deep cleaning and de-cluttering when ordinary methods fail to please. No schedule necessary other than the one imposed by holidays, season changes, and weird odors.

This deep cleaning includes things like vacuuming under and behind furniture, getting up to the tippy-top of bookshelves, washing curtains, steam cleaning the carpet, and the like. The extreme measures.

So, the zone time in Leila’s plan is about 20-30 minutes daily (each zone hit once per week) plus 1 hour weekly (each zone hit about once per month). Certainly that is reasonable, if it is possible. I remain slightly dubious about that time commitment being all that is necessary, but I am game to give it a shot.

Securing a Reasonably Clean House: Initial Steps & Secrets

The Original Source

The chatty, photo-laden, good-humored original.

1. The Reasonably Clean, Fairly Neat, and Comfortably Tidy House.
2. A Pep Talk for Organization.
3. In which I give you a secret to get you started on The Reasonably Clean House.

My Summary & Reflection

The basics

Leila gives us 4 steps to taking dominion in our domain:

1. Know what is for dinner. Plan your menus.
2. Catch up on laundry. Establish a system for addressing laundry.
3. Get up on time to be on top of your day.

Then, you know what she says?

“Yea, if you do these three things, you will have a deep satisfaction in your home life.”

THREE things, then number FOUR is

/4/. Keep a reasonably clean and tidy house.

The first three are first because she says — and I have found it to be true myself — that when any the first three slide, the fourth is sabotaged and nigh impossible. Now, I linked those first three to her posts on those topics, because I am not going to address them directly myself. I do plan my menus and check the dinner plan the night before and first thing in the morning, I’ve been mostly keeping up with laundry, and I know that number 3 is vital particularly to me, yet I have been failing miserably lately. Can I still claim sleep deprivation nine months later? Humph. I think I was a morning person until Knox’s first year; now my mind counts sleep as a scarce resource, not to be so lightly tossed aside at the sound of an alarm. Anyway….we’re not going to talk about that now, ok?

So, then. Number four. A reasonably clean house. After the initial steps, come Leila’s pre-secrets:

1. Take a shower, get dressed in regular clothes, add an apron if you’ll get dirty. – This invigorates, emboldens, and prepares you to take on the day – You are now dressed and ready for action, for whatever the day holds

2. Be fast and lively in your work. – get through it quickly – work will fill the time allotted to it, so don’t allot it much time; attack it.

I am a firm believer in #1, but that is primarily because it fits my type. I tend toward the formal rather than casual, and so I feel more “me” when I am dressed nicely. When I am in yoga pants or the like, I feel lazy, sloppy, and like the most appropriate thing to do is curl up on the couch with a book. I am a “dressed to the shoes” type wholeheartedly, but I do think it’s a personality thing.

Number two has slowly come to me, I have realized, as more and more things have been added to my plate. I get much more done now than 6 or 7 years ago, and part of that is simply because I have more to do. My inherent procrastination tendency has had to make way for reality. I can’t put everything off until 3 or 4, then go into whirlwind-panic mode and whip things into shape so it wasn’t obvious that I had spent hours reading and letting the baby make messes he shouldn’t have. The more I see that my time is limited, and I have things that must be done, the easier I find it to get on with my work. But those whirlwind-panic modes and the whirlwind modes that I learned when the house was on the market and realtors would call with 15-20 minutes warning, at least taught me that much can be accomplished with short, focused bursts.

That focus that drove the bursts, however, was given by a real deadline. It is a little difficult to manufacture such deadlines, but timers go a long way toward inducing the mode.

Next come Auntie Leila’s starting secrets:

1. Start your efforts in your bedroom, where your day begins & where your marriage is renewed.

“So, although Flylady has you start with your kitchen sink, and certainly, much has to happen before the sink gets shiny, which makes her idea clever, I wonder:

If you start in the kitchen, will you ever leave?

The Sidetracked Home Executives have you start with your entryway, which I do not dismiss. It’s about seeing yourself as others see you — we’ll get there.

But after about thirty years of reflection, I am having you start in the room you share with your husband.

[...]

If it weren’t for the intimate aspect of your commitment, your family would not be.”

1. When decluttering, remove everything from the surface. Only put back what belongs, then deal with the leftovers. Do not declutter-in-place.

This is total, immediate commitment and instant gratification, plus an easy, quick start. It’s brilliant.

Lastly for this post are Leila’s two secrets for keeping the house on track during and after the decluttering efforts:

1. The Moderate Clean — Sparkle & Shine — Afternoon Chores

The moderate clean is 20-30 minutes committed daily to cleaning one zone of the house.

1. The Blitz

The blitz is 15-20 minutes of a rapid pick-up and returning-of-stuff for the rest of the house.

The blitz is a lightening strike on a room that has been reasonably maintained (in other words, not a room in need of a deep clean but simply one that has endured three nano-seconds of kid-exposure).

Even accounting for the realities of multiple children and homeschooling, one hour, she promises, is a reasonable amount of time for cleaning the house and keeping it decent and presentable, livable, “reasonably clean.”

On these two concepts we will spend the bulk of our musings.

Securing a Reasonably Clean House: An Introduction

Have you yet discovered Auntie Leila at Like Mother, Like Daughter? She has a great series called The Reasonably Clean House. I have a weakness for reading articles and blog series that claim it is possible to have at least a semblance of order and cleanliness while homeschooling a brood. Keeping things clean does not come naturally to me, but I cannot shake the idea (try as I might) that it is an area I am to grow in, and that at least keeping things decent and presentable is possible.

So, Mondays will be housekeeping days on the blog again for awhile, because I find that writing through things helps get the ideas sunk into my head, which in turn helps them actually get into my fingers. Plus, it brings an element of accountability as I can hardly write and publish on housekeeping and then turn a blind eye to my routines and my laundry pile. My plan is to go through Like Mother, Like Daughter’s Reasonably Clean House tutorial posts in 3-4 posts, then go through Large Family Logistics in 3-5 posts.

It is always helpful to start by reminding oneself of the reasons you are doing what you are doing. I have spent some years, now a number of years ago, thinking that keeping up with the house was actually not an important thing, not a thing that really mattered, not something worth the time and effort necessary. Not surprisingly, I didn’t keep things very clean or tidy during those times, and it seemed an impossible effort to do so. I have been convinced otherwise. And it was only after that convincing that I began making progress, and the more I go on, the less impossible it becomes. I still have a long way to go, but the farther I get on, the more I actually start enjoying the process. Who could have guessed?

In “A Reasonably Clean House,” speaking from and of her years of ups and downs, Leila gives us some reasons for cleaning:

“The sooner you embrace [your duties] the happier you will be.”

and

“Order is liberating. You can think about other things when your home is orderly.”

and

“You will be nicer to your children and your husband if you aren’t constantly irritated by the dirt and ‘background noise’ in your house.”

and

“You will be content with your things and finally conquer that vague ‘If only my house were perfect’ nagging feeling that makes you waste time and spiritual energy.”

Leila then defines “reasonably clean” as “one that has order, but doesn’t take all day to get there, and one we can whip into shape if we need to, as opposed to booming and busting.”

So “reasonably clean” is a personal, individual balance between not shirking one’s work, giving a good effort, and not being anxious or spending too much time on it (ha!). In other words, absolutely spotless is not our goal. Our goal is to apply ourselves evenly across our domain, not booming and busting (something I am always doing!) and not being uptight in one area while ignoring something equally important like meals or clean clothes or not-disgusting bathrooms. Leila’s series zeroes in on the basics and gives some great tips for making it happen and — most importantly — keeping it happening.