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.
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