Housework, housekeeping, home management, whatever one likes to call it, does not come naturally to me. I am not a person of routine and my self-employed freelancer lifestyle does not lend itself to routine as each day is rarely the same as the next. As a family, or maybe as a couple, we tend to be “yes” people and don’t stop to think if we are going to have time to fit the chores in. We just look in the diary and see if that morning/afternoon/evening is blank and say yes if it is – even if that means dashing from a train straight to the thing we’ve said yes to.Over the years I have made a number of attempts at permanently keeping the tidiness of the house under control:
1) chores charts for each member of the family – which worked for a time but for some weird reason stopped working when Ben decided he would like to format the graphic layout differently!?!
2) I’ve employed cleaners at various points – but the stress of getting tidy before they arrive was enormous and a couple of girls that were excellent at tidying for me, I have since heard that they absolutely dreaded the day they had to come and do our house. Well I can tell you, I feel just as overwhelmed when I have a free day at home!
3) For one of my cleaners I was always required to leave a list so, like the computer nerd that I am, I developed a “Home Management” database in Microsoft Access. It lists the rooms in the house, tasks that need to be done in each room, the frequency they are required to be done eg daily, weekly, twice weekly, monthly, quarterly etc, the length of time each job should ideally take and so on.
There is a screen to view the jobs that are due and when the Done check box is ticked it will calculate the next due date based on the frequency of that job, or equally if the date a job was one on is entered, in the event that it has been done a few days earlier.
A button can be clicked to produce a list of jobs that need to be done and the total time for each room. And if a list for a cleaner is required the next due date can have today’s date entered into it for jobs that I would want a cleaner to carry out –
totalling up to 3 hours of course! Oops!!
There is of course one major flaw with my system – it can’t do the work!!!
4) Another attempt was to take before and after pictures and I had hoped to laminate them and get them out to motivate me or another family member by labelling the laminate “Does this room look like this (before) or this (after) ... then make sure it look like this (arrow pointing to the after)! That was four years ago ... (we seem to have move furniture and decorated more that I had thought)... and as you can see there are not as many after pictures as there are before:
Kitchen - before
Kitchen - After
Living Room - before
Living Room - After
My office - sorry no after photos! Maybe one day!
Bathroom - Before
Bathroom - After
Our Bedroom - Before
Tidy!!
And finally - Darcy Room before but no afters - although it has since been redeisgned by Darcy in Orange and Pink!
Well it seems that the old faithful trick we can rely on the most is to arrange for people to come round for dinner, or a party or to stay for the weekend – then of course we manically spring into action. But that then leaves us with the problem of the storage areas being stuffed with random things to be sorted at later date!
