Day Twenty: Be Your Own Maid

Image from Flickr

I love having a clean home but don’t love housework.  I wish I was one of those people who clean for fun, but I’m not.  And since I don’t have a housekeeper or a maid, I’m constantly dreaming up ways to motivate myself so I don’t live in a dusty pit.

One way to encourage myself is to change my way of thinking – from housework as a necessary evil to thinking of it as taking care of my home and my family.  It is a very nurturing thing to do for yourself and those you love to ensure there is a clean and comfortable home to come back to at the end of the day.

Here are some of the ways I have come up with to make myself love cleaning.

I like to buy nice supplies.  Baking soda and vinegar are my number one duo and I use these for loads of cleaning jobs, but I also love pretty cleaning products.  Over the past year I’ve been using Mrs Meyers countertop sprays in geranium and honeysuckle, and bathroom cleaning spray in lavender.  For not much cost these are a real treat and I look forward to using them.

Having a love for sparsely decorated and shiny clean hotel bathrooms makes me happy to use my Mrs Meyers sprays often (and 50/50 white vinegar/water for the mirrors) to achieve this look.  And the more often you do things the less dirt builds up.  For two of us I find once a week for everything is fine.

If there is something quick – a five minute job (and many are) – I do it right there and then.  As quick as you can think of an excuse for leaving something undone, you could have done it.  By the same token, sometimes I try to do jobs as quickly as possible, as usually I am quite slow-moving and meticulous which adds up to my cleaning jobs taking all day with no time left for fun.

Keeping cleaning supplies where I use them is very helpful too.  If something is to hand I am more likely to use it which makes perfect sense when you think about it.  We have two bathrooms and two toilets, so now I have duplicates so that all the products I need are in each room and I don’t have to take them back and forth.  I also have paper towels and clean rags (large squares from worn out t-shirts are fantastic) in both bathrooms and keep them stocked.

Plain-scented wet wipes are kept in three different places which means there is always one available for a quick clean-up job or window-sill dust.  They are also great for wiping along skirting boards.

I do my worst job first, which is vacuuming.  I find it quite physically demanding and vacuuming also twists my lower back, so I do it in the morning when I feel most energized and also to get it out of the way first.  Then mopping the hard floor areas, then it’s onto easier tasks.

I often think how it would be more enjoyable to clean someone else’s house than my own.  Do you ever feel like that?  Because of this, I can approach my housework as if it’s not my house that I’m cleaning and sometimes it even works.  I think I’d make a really good housekeeper (although I would be very expensive) so imagining I am cleaning someone else’s house works well for me.

Taking pleasure in cleaning and making it fun and enjoyable is how I get through my housework.  Do you have any tricks you employ to motivate yourself?