Schedule

One of the most important things I learned from Maxine is keeping a schedule. It still is amazing to me that she taught herself everything about housekeeping. Unfortunately, her mother didn't keep house very well. Grandma talks about her with love, but says she feels something was going on with her mother that she never knew about.

As I spent some time talking with her about how overwhelmed I get keeping house, she shared this secret with me. "I had certain days that I did everything on. On Mondays I would clean all the pictures and woodwork..." She would say that it is just "common sense" to do it that way-but if so, she has a lot more sense than I do.

So, I wrote down all the things I need to do to keep the house clean. I then split it up into the 5 days of the work week, putting laundry and vacuuming down several days and included weight lifting. I came up with the following:

Monday: laundry, weights, clean* the upstairs and change sheets, brush dogs
Tuesday: volunteer at school, clean baseboards, vacuum
Wednesday: weights, clean* basement and first floor, clean blinds in one room
Thursday: Laundry, volunteer, clean windows and appliances, vacuum
Friday: weights, organize one room, yard work

* includes dusting, straightening, and cleaning bathrooms

It is amazing! It may sound like a lot, but when it is broken down like this it is not. Each week got easier, too , because there was less dust and mess. The bathrooms didn't require as much scrubbing either ( I have 4 to clean) Laundry didn't pile up.

Doing this also revealed another little secret that Maxine has...Now I know why women in the early half of the 20th century didn't gain so much weight! You burn calories doing all this and you don't have time to snack. My arms were sore and it wasn't from the weights!

The nice thing about this was that I had it all done by the time the boys were home from school. My husband doesn't expect a perfectly clean house and never complains when it looks like a tornado went through, but he admitted that it was really nice to come home to a clean house.