The Frugality of Cleanliness: Priorities

I talked earlier this week about the importance of setting time limits when it comes to homemaking tasks. Now, I'm going to talk about how to use those little bits of time.

When I first started out as a homemaker, I tried the card file system Pam and Peggy used. I failed miserably. I tried lists, I tried planners, I tried many things, but what I finally realized is something that was mentioned in the book Pigpen to Paradise that I had somehow missed. It was also touched on in FlyLady's system but it took reading Fascinating Womanhood before I was able to articulate what I had never been taught in all my years growing up.

Just to be clear, I had to be taught this. It wasn't something I would ever learn by osmosis. I had to learn what was important in my role as a homemaker.

The only places I've seen this mentioned are books about business or How To Be A Better Employee In 30 Seconds Or Less. As far as I know, no one sits a young person down as part of a homemaking course and says "Yes, dear, you can freeze a month's worth of meals in one day but before you do you need to make sure these other chores are done first."

Maybe I just wasn't taught well. Considering the previous generation, I don't think I'm alone in that.

FlyLady worked for me because it set the priorities for me. I do my Morning Routine first (which includes decluttering/Zone work), then whatever needs to be done for the day (according to my Basic Weekly Plan) as well as homeschool for the kids, and then I do my Before Bed Routine. And inside each routine is a list of things that take priority. But, let me say it again, it took FlyLady to set those priorities for me.

By the time I read Fascinating Womanhood, I already had a good idea of where my priorities should be. I had learned which parts of the house and which chores took priority over others. So, when I saw how Andelin broke things down in FW, it made sense. In fact, it expanded my view of homemaking.

First, I'll give a list of what I've found to be the most important chores to be done in a house. This is not set in stone. This is what I've found to be true according to my experience. Afterward, I'll explain how I expanded the list.

• Take care of yourself first. I know that doesn't make much sense, but too many women look down on themselves as homemakers because they don't know their limits and end up tired, beaten, and wearing clothes for three days straight because they don't take the time for themselves. Get up a little earlier in the morning so you're not too rushed, put on something workable but nice, and really get ready for your day.
  
• Always spend a little time every day on the bathrooms. Clear off the counters, put away any out of place items, wipe surfaces down with some soap and scrub the toilet. It takes less than 3 minutes per bathroom and you will find yourself grinning all day. Don't just do the guest bathrooms either. You deserve a clean bathroom, too.
• Make sure the family is fed and fed well: breakfast, lunch and dinner. This is something that needs frequent attention if you cook at home. Not concentrated attention... frequent. A minute before bed to see what the next day's menu -- or, if you're in our house, the next couple of days since some things we make take a few days to prepare -- a minute in the morning to make sure you're on track and a minute at noon for the same reason. I say "fed well" because the better you feed your family, the less food they'll want to eat. Try it and you'll see. Also, believe it or not, it's cheaper to eat healthy.
  
• Do the dishes every day and make sure your sink is clean at night.
• Do at least one load of laundry every day (two or three if you have a big family like ours). I tried having a laundry day and it just overwhelmed me, even after culling the unnecessaries from my kids' clothes. Maybe Laundry Day will work for you and yours but I've always ended up with too much to do every day. Thank goodness for washers and dryers or I wouldn't have a choice in the matter.
  
• Spend two minutes cleaning surfaces and five minutes cleaning the chair and floor. I try to do this for every room in the house but on days when my energy is shot, I only do the living room and dining room.
• Floors are the most important part of a room. People expect stuff to gather on surfaces. Floors have less of an excuse, not to mention the dangers of having stuff on the floor where people walk. If nothing else gets clean in a room, pick up stuff off the floor and give it a sweep if it doesn't have carpet. This especially applies to the dining room.
• Clean the kitchen after every meal. This will naturally extend out of washing the dishes, but it isn't as high a priority. It makes the top chores list because having an after-meal routine keeps your kitchen cleared and ready for cooking. It does not surpass dishes because it is possible to cook on a messy counter. Not pleasant, but it is possible.
  
• Declutter every day for fifteen minutes. This has got to be the best advice I got from FlyLady. When I do this, the mess in my house becomes much more manageable because there's less stuff to take care of. If nothing else, spend a couple of days (fifteen minutes each day) cleaning out and organizing the pantry. You'll be so very glad you did. I also apply this to rooms that have gotten out of hand. I tell myself I'm only going to spend fifteen minutes putting stuff away. It may not be perfect by the end, but it always looks better.

These are the chores I've found that take priority over everything else. When I do these every day, my stress decreases dramatically and my house almost seems to clean itself. When I'm having a day where I know I won't be able to do nearly as much as I like, having this list in my head keeps me from becoming scattered and ineffective.

In addition to this, I have a master priority list. It's organized by Most Important, Secondary, and Lower priorities and expands on the previous list.

Most Important

• My health
• My baby
• My appearance (it's a cruel fact that humans behave toward others based on appearance... this includes the glance you give yourself in the mirror)
• Kids fed/meals on time
• Clean house/walkable
• Laundry/Mr. Vinca's clothes (there's a story behind that... another time) :)

Secondary

• Homeschooling/therapy
• Deeper housecleaning
• Sewing
• Garden/sprouting
• Decluttering
• Writing/blogging

Lower

• Seasonal sorting
• Home decorating
• Organizing paperwork
• Spring cleaning
• Charity work
• Me time

By keeping to this list, I've managed to keep my priorities together and that's kept me from burning out trying to take care of the house, family, and myself. By avoiding burnout, I can stay home, which cuts all sorts of costs out of our budget. And when I stick to this list, I know when to ease up on our frugal choices and where.

Next time, I'll discuss decluttering.

The Frugality of Cleanliness Addendum: The Importance of Two Minutes

In addition to spending five minutes at a time cleaning up a room, try taking two minutes to clean off surfaces... especially those surfaces where people set stuff down "temporarily". You can put it away as part of the two minute clean up or pick things up for two minutes and put them away after the timer chirps.

If you do these two things every day, even if you only work in one room in your house, your house will look surprisingly clean.

I got this idea from FlyLady but her definition of Hot Spots is a bit broader than mine. I've found the two minute idea works great for surfaces (other than the kitchen counters) while the five minute Room Rescue works great for chairs and floors.

(One more thing... I'm not perfect in this. I've spent half of my homemaker years pregnant and cleaning was often the last thing I ended up doing. But sticking to the little bits of time, though it hasn't kept my house spotless, has made it manageable. Very important when you have six little ones to keep up with.)

The Frugality of Cleanliness: The Beauty of Five Minutes

Sorry it's been so long between posts. Several things took precedence this week, including a sudden emergency with my teeth. Everything's better now and hopefully there won't be any more interruptions for a while.

Back to the series. :)

I have found the most important thing in cleaning my house is my timer. It's not only a great motivator but it's also a wonderful limit.

In the past, I had a moderate cleaning day and a heavy cleaning day. On the moderate cleaning day, I did a fair amount of work, but the killer once a week was my heavy cleaning day. That was the day I would fill to the brim with all sorts of chores. By midday, I would be culling my list, trying to reschedule many items, or -- this happened more often than it should have -- I would decide I was just being lazy and get to work... which would leave me exhausted on the living room couch and snapping at any child who dared ask me for even a cup of water.

After all, I worked so hard for them all day, didn't I? I deserved a break.

Now, I realize I was teaching my children that housework was something to be dreaded, that it's okay for mommies to snap at their kids and that they should avoid trying to be homemakers at all costs if they wanted to have daily peace in their lives.

It wasn't until I began reading more (and especially after I read some of FlyLady's philosophy on cleaning) that I realized what I should do: let it go.

Well, kind of.

What I learned was that I had a horrible sense of time. I also had a lousy sense of priorities: the cobwebs in the corner were just as important in my mind as the crumbs under the dining room table. We'll get to that in a second. First, I had to learn how to become aware of time.

I remember the exact day I learned it, too. One of our daughters needed to have her floor cleaned. I asked my husband to watch the kids while I cleaned it. After what I felt was only a few minutes, he called out to me, asking me when I was going to be done. "Not much longer," I called back. What I felt were just a few more minutes went by and this time he was standing in the door, looking haggard.

I found out that a job I had thought would only take 30 minutes had actually taken an hour and a half... and I was only halfway done.

Needless to say, I stopped working on the room and my husband and I had a long, long talk which ended with him saying he felt I was task-based. I had a list of things that had to be done and time meant nothing to that list.

Of course, my easy counter was, "These are all important things." He didn't dispute that. However, he did point out that sometimes a person just runs out of time. It wasn't as easy to see in my world because I didn't have to report to anyone on a daily basis on my current projects, though the whole family felt the strain. It happened to him a lot at work where deadlines ruled everything he did. "Sometimes," he said, "you just have to decide that this is the best you can do and move on."

I really didn't like that. But he was right. And over the next year or two, I managed to get it through my head that I had to have a timer with me at all times to make sure I didn't do more than I could handle.

And in the process I learned something very important about cleaning and frugality: it is better to spend five minutes on several things, than two hours on one.

Sometimes, of course, I can't get around it. We were all ill last month and the month before because of misplaced priorities (a story for another blog) and, partially because I was the only one who didn't get sick, I ended up doing laundry non-stop almost every day. Quite a bit of my time was spent either doing laundry or (because I happen to be pregnant) resting from doing the laundry. However, even during times like that, I would try to spend five minutes at a time either cleaning the kitchen, or the living room, or one of the bedrooms (with the kids' help if they felt up to it). During times when he wasn't sick, my husband helped as well.

Because we all did a little, the house didn't completely fall apart. And because I limited myself to five minutes at a time, I was able to divide up my chores so that, ironically, I got more done and it was done better than if I had devoted larger blocks of time to it. And I wasn't completely exhausted at the end.

Now, how does this relate to frugality? Well, there's the general principle that it's the little things that often matter the most, but part of frugality is also learning to value time. Is it really worth my time right now to buy fast food when I know my kids won't be as healthy, will more than likely get sick from it since there's a bug going around, and the food won't fill them up nearly as much as even making sandwiches at home? In another half an hour I'm probably going to be dealing with cranky hungry kids with quite a bit less in my pocket to use for better food.

Is it really worth my time to make my own clothes? Is it really worth my time to go to the thrift store? To make my own bread? To buy cheap shoes? To buy expensive ones?

Each person has to make their own judgment on these items. At the moment, I don't make our bread. I buy a few loaves once a week from the clearance shelf at the local bread thrift store, along with some tortillas. This works for us because I feel my energy should be used toward other things, especially taking care of myself so my pregnancy goes well. I use the bread when I have an energy low and still need to feed the kids (they love sandwiches). This means I have a lot more energy during the week, which keeps us from relying on convenience foods as much as we might if I didn't try making bread each week. Also, it keeps our electricity down because the AC doesn't have to try to compete with the oven. And here in Texas, that's no small thing.

As for five minutes itself, there are many small, frugal things a person can do in five minutes or less: check the house to make sure lights are off, take the lint out of the dryer vent, write down the name of a favorite recipe that doesn't cost much, find out the cost of making a favorite recipe in the first place, list a bunch of unwanted stuff on Freecycle, look to see if anyone is giving anything away on Freecycle, check out the clearance racks at your favorite store, work a little on a garden (see Square Foot Gardening for more on this idea) and so on and so forth.

So, where does your time matter most? Next week, I'll talk about priorities.