The School for Housewives brings you short, practical, and thoughtful messages to inspire you to make your home. If you’re new here, go to the homepage for the previous Lessons; the categories are arranged in the menu bar at the top.
Go here for The Tidying of the Things lesson to be sure you’re caught up.
Let’s review the Moderate Clean* now that it’s Spring and we have a bit more energy for getting things freshened up!
Nearly every day you want to spend about 45 minutes in a zone in your house, dusting and really digging out the corners, under the furniture, and behind things. You can and should make your minions help you if they are at all sentient.
Remember to start in the same place every time. Go around the periphery in the same direction, and finish up in the middle, scooching things out of the room in a laundry basket if necessary, without actually leaving until you’re done, lest you get sidetracked.
Beyond dusting:
You need a bucket of warm water with cleanser, and/or your favorite spray, some cleaning cloths (which can certainly be rags; I favor old flannel torn into 12-18” squares and don’t really like microfiber at all), and a demoted, absorbent towel. Wipe down the door frames, baseboards, chair legs and backs, dresser sides, or what have you, depending on which room you are in.
Some rooms need more wiping down than others: the kitchen, for instance, needs a good cleaning of cabinet doors and table and chairs at least once a week. For grubby door frames, a magic eraser (affiliate link) is… magic. A weak solution of your non-bleach cleanser with a small amount of ammonia added gets grease off.
Some furniture should be wiped with a damp cloth only, or a cloth on which you have put some orange oil, such as your dining-room hutch or living room side tables, or your piano.
Finish by vacuuming, including under sofa cushions. Starting with vacuuming is why you never feel things are really clean. In the kitchen, the last act is to mop the floor.
This moderate clean can and should be done with more or less intensity depending on your circumstances, and then your whole house will always be Reasonably Clean, Neat, and Tidy.
Done with a great deal of intensity, it becomes a Deep Clean, and is not necessary every week, in my humble opinion, but in Spring, it might run to taking down curtains for a wash and wiping down the rods and tops of the windows! If the windows and their sills need washing, you can do this before you put the curtains back on.
*Go here for all the housekeeping posts!
Happy Housewife by Normal Rockwell
As with everything here at the SFH, the best thing is for you to take my ideas, coming from my experience of escaping feminism to enjoy 45 years of marriage and raise seven children, and apply them to your situation with discernment, prudence, and confidence — and a sense of humor!
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For the longer version:
My book on how to live with the Liturgical Year: The Little Oratory
Does anyone have any thoughts for those of us who haven’t been taught how to clean: how to manage the house and cleaning it amidst the homeschooling, the baby, toddler, and older kids, laundry, shopping needs, exercise, prayer, etc etc.? While I would love to do the kind of cleaning Auntie Leila lays out in this article, I find it extremely daunting. My house is a mess in general; my bedroom is the dumping ground for when we have company coming. Not sure where to begin to tackle this. Any thoughts?