Taking back the house (cleaning)

So last summer, between working two jobs, farm chores, and traveling out of town for doctor's appointments (bad hip), I found that housecleaning had fallen way down the page on my list of to-do's. Most weeks I just didn't have the time or the energy after those long, sweaty shifts at the winery or two-and-a half-hour drives to the orthopedist's office. 

And so for the last four months, I've had a lady coming in once every two weeks and doing the heavier cleaning for me. That's always how it is when you're busy. Over the years I have found that the more hours I've worked, the more stuff I've had the tendency to hire out for others to do. I'm not sure if this is a strictly American middle-class phenomenon, but it can include everything from having the house cleaned, to eating out because you have no time to cook, to paying someone else to raise your kids, pay your bills, do your taxes, mow your lawn or prune your hedges.

A few years ago I even heard there was a service starting that would build your raised beds, then tend, care for and ultimately harvest your backyard crops for you. It's true.

I can make no judgements on people who have "satellite staff" to do the stuff they can't, because I've obviously done the same when I needed to. When I worked full-time as a teacher I had a gardener (who mowed the lawn), an after-school day care provider, and every Thursday the pizza joint downtown delivered a Large Pepperoni With Extra Sauce to my home because I just didn't feel like cooking. 

Anyway, here in the present day, after a third of a year not doing much housework, I've realized I not only miss the money I've been spending on a housekeeper but -- get this -- I actually miss cleaning my own home. Who knew? The time you clean your home is actually a close-up time to tenderly preserve and care for your property investments -- your home and furnishings.  I feel the same when working in the garden, which celebrates and cares for our land. House cleaning celebrates and cares for our home.

Tools of the trade.

Plus when you hire out, there's also the issue of the cleaning you do before the cleaners show up. No underwear under the bed, used kleenex on the sofa or personal bills left on the counter for all to see. We have some pride, after all. When I was doing it myself, this was a non-issue.

But watching the folks who did our housecleaning the last few months has given me a new appreciation for the work itself, and how we tend to under-value it when we're the ones doing it. When I resume these duties, I will definitely be doing it in a more mindful fashion And so, here are a few rules I think are essential to respecting the important task housekeeping is:

1.  From now on, I'm putting house cleaning on the schedule rather than playing catch up, or doing it in fits and starts that I try and squeeze in here and there. I've spent some time figuring out how much time it takes to clean every room and I'm going to schedule it the same way I schedule work. After all, if you hire someone to do it for you, they come in at an appointed time and go off a checklist until everything is done. Why shouldn't I do the same?

2. I am starting to purchase the correct products for what I'm cleaning. There is no reason to be on my hands and knees scrubbing the shower if I can buy a perfectly good shower brush with telescoping handle and save myself a lot of pain (think of the money I'll save on Aleve!) not to mention time. Ditto for floors. If the floor cleaner (whether that's a vacuum, broom, microfiber mop or something else) is not up to scratch, it's me who will end up working harder. I'm going to give myself the gift of good tools and products. If they're not in the local store, I'm getting them online. My cleaning lady would.

3. Recognize my limits. There is no shame in hiring out what you cannot do. I still intend to have our housekeeper come in on a quarterly basis and do a deep cleaning, which I might find difficult to do physically. I'm getting older. My new motto is this: if it's painful for you to do, bring in reinforcements, even if it's only a couple of times a year.

I'm looking forward to getting back into the routine of cleaning my house, but with a new perspective, having watched how the pros do it for a few months. Hopefully I will be able to do at least as good a job as them, perhaps even more so now after learning some of their techniques and learning to respect it for the important job it is.

I may never love housecleaning the way I love my job, but I do love my home, and that makes any work I put into it totally worth the effort.

Country Clean

Monday nights can sometimes be a little bit rough around here, because Monday morning is the time I clean each week.  I  sweep the floor, then go over it with a microfiber cloth stuck on a Swiffer.  Then I mop. I vacuum the rest of the house and clean the bathrooms most of the time, too. So by the end of the day, the house looks pretty darn good.

Then at approximately 6 pm, the men come home. And it's on, baby.

Fist, they try and walk in with their shoes on. Ain't gonna happen.

The they decide to have something like watermelon with dinner, so now the kitchen counter, the floor beside the counter, and the coffee table in the living room has sticky pink watermelon juice on it (just a few hours after I CLEANED ALL OF IT). There was a reason our parents made us eat watermelon outside when we were kids, and I get that now.

So basically, by about 8 p.m. I end up somewhere between pitching a fit and having a meltdown. And once I've dried my tears and put down the shotgun or cast iron skillet I've been waving around in a threatening manner (joking, but it's close sometimes), I always hear the same comment:  "But we live in the country!  What do you expect?"

So what do you think?  Is living in the country a decent excuse for having a dirtier than average home?  

I'm pretty mellow on the weekend, when most of our "country" things are happening -- when fences are being strung, trees pruned, and compost turned.  That's when dust, mud, hay, and other things too gross to mention get tracked in -- no surprise there.  

The weekend is also when Big Ag and Groceries will make snacks throughout the day, which means my granite counters feel exactly like the food prep area of the greasy spoon diner in town by about mid-afternoon on Sunday.  

The weekends are also when even the dog seems to bring in the majority of the pieces of bark, fruit mummies, and bits of straw attached to himself, and then plunk himself down on the sofa without a second thought.  Kind of sad that he's in on the whole thing too. But that's OK. I get it. It's the weekend and everyone's outdoors a lot. And some of the outside gets in when that's going on.

That's why Monday is Cleaning Day.

I've had girlfriends around here tell me their farmer husbands use the "but we live in the country" gambit whenever they request their mates kindly remove their shoes before tracking horse manure on the carpets, or throwing a straw-covered jacket down on a clean comforter on the bed. 

But I don't know, is it country living?  Is the standard of cleanliness and hygiene different if you live on acreage?  Or is it just an excuse for some folks to act like slobs or have a dirty home?

For me personally, I'm all for dirtiness outside, but I want the inside of my house to be clean(ish).  I don't want to stumble on mystery clods of brown material (hmmm, is that dirt or poop?  And how can I determine which one without reaching down to touch or smell it...).  I don't see why a kitchen counter that's been messed up with strawberry jam that's just been canned or dirty onion tops  shouldn't be cleaned well afterwards.

Is it just me?  Are my standards too high, or are my men trying to get away with being slobs with no accountability? 

I ask myself these questions almost every Tuesday. Because on Mondays I clean, and on Monday nights, my beloved family attempts to undo everything I've been working on all day long.

Because we live in the country, dontcha know.

Why I Love Mondays

If you are a homemaker or a homesteader, you probably love Mondays.  I know I do.  When you work in your home and on your home, making it clean, organized and fruitful, Mondays are the best day of the week.  You wake up in the morning, in your work place and ready to hit the ground running on your never-ending chore list....but without the distractions that are often present on Saturdays and Sundays (even though they are nice distractions).

I love our weekends and I love the activities my husband and I find ourselves involved in.  But I'm often glad once Sunday night comes around and I know tomorrow is Monday.  This is a bold contrast to how I felt when I worked outside the home.  I hated Mondays, because I knew I had to leave home the next five days in a row, for most of the hours I was awake. I can't think of a single job I held where that fact did not depress me just a little bit.  Some jobs were worse than others, but even the best ones left me longing, just a little, to be home enjoying the house I was working so hard to pay a mortgage on.  In truth, I'm probably the ideal personality type to work from home.

Today I am back to the blissful routine of cleaning, hanging wash, composting, cleaning chicken coops, and continuing to lay drip lines for the front yard landscaping.  It's quiet and the pace I set my work at is my own.  I will work hard, but I am working for myself, and that makes all the difference.  Perhaps people who own a shop or restaurant feel the same way...going to work on your own property is a sweet feeling, no question.

Mondays I always breathe a little bit easier.  I get organized, get clean, and enjoy the sweet routine of householding until Friday comes along again, when I'm ready for another break in the routine.

It's hooray for Monday -- every Monday -- here at the Hot Flash Homestead.

Re-usable Swiffer inserts

The original good idea

Like most people who have wood floors, I love the original Swiffer sweeper.  Like most conservationists, I think the idea of buying a box of Swiffer sheets (to be used briefly and then discarded) is a ridiculous idea.  These days there is even an electric Swiffer out there, which uses a charger to run a little motor that sucks things into a dixie cup-sized dust container, in exactly the same way a vacuum does.  Except, unlike a vacuum, it stays plugged into its charger when not in use, and therefore uses electricity 24 hours a day.  Seems like a big price to pay to pick up Fluffy's pet hair. There is also a Swiffer mop available, which uses batteries (I think) to run something that squirts floor cleaner on the floor before you mop, so you don't have to... or something like that.

This is just one of the many times a company has found themselves with a successful product and then ruined the whole idea by taking it up a notch or two (or ten). 

Seriously, what a Swiffer floor cleaner has always been best at is removing what remains after you've given your floor a thorough sweeping with a broom.  It picks up the leftover stuff that's impossible to catch with either a broom or dustpan, like flyaway dust-bunnies (which in our house are more the size of dust mastedons), ash, fabric fluff and pet hair. 

Made better with a washable electrostatic cloth

But, if you go ahead and buy one of those old-fashioned, 10 dollar original Swiffers, you can easily attach a washable, re-usable electrostatic cloth to the Swiffer instead of their sheets, and use the same cloths over and over, shaking them out and/or washing them in between uses.  That not only saves money, but also energy and paper.  

The electrostatic cloths are available in most supermarket cleaning-supply aisles.  They're quite cheap; under $5 American for a package of three. They also work great as regular old, dustclothes, thereby eliminating the need for, you guessed it,  a Swiffer duster (which features plastic handles and non-reusable dusting attachments).

In other words, it may be a Swiffer world, but you don't necessarily have to live in it as their parent corporation would probably like you to, constantly trolling the aisles of your favorite store looking for refills of their products.

The Swiffer is a good idea...but that doesn't mean it can't be made better.

Inside Days, Outside Days

I've realized recently that my days are pretty much divided into two categories -- inside days and outside days.  I don't have a preference of the two, unless the weather is doing something extremely hot or cold, but I've noticed I get more work done if I devote my time to either one or the other -- not both.

Inside Days

Inside days involve doing laundry, cleaning, making soap, laundry detergent, lotions and salves, doing canning and preserves, and often fixing a dinner that requires maximum involvement. Think oven-baked chicken, biscuits, a fresh salad and homemade dressing, and a cobbler for dessert.  My family loves inside days, because on outside days, they're sometimes left to fend for themselves, meal-wise.

Outside days are harder physically, but it's incredibly rewarding to work out in the fresh air and sun all day long.  These days usually consist of cleaning out coops, planting, watering, sweeping, digging, and other manual labor-oriented tasks, as well as running into town to errand and do my weekly grocery shopping.

But trying to do both in the same day often proves problematic.  The days I spend outdoor digging and trudging up and down our hill are NOT the ones that leave me with enough time or energy to fix a real, made-from-scratch, sit-down dinner.  The days I've spent indoors, cleaning up after the family, don't always leave me with a strong desire to go out and get super dirty (and bring a bunch of dirt back inside to the clean house).  And it's hard to shift gears, once you've been doing one thing all day long.  

Outside Days

I'm thinking my great-grandmothers probably had a similar schedule, and may even have felt the same way as me.  They probably had to choose between canning and gardening, planting and preserving, making soap or making rows for crops. Of course back then both spouses worked the land and so chores were divided on a daily basis (perhaps at least somewhat based on gender), but I'm sure my grannies used to wake up, look at what needed to be done and ask themselves if they were going to have an inside, or outside kind of day.

Whatever kind of day you're having, I hope it's a good one.