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copyright ©1999-2003 |
cleaning
house
by
Jill S. Barrett | 1
2 3 continued from page 2 The only thing I do regularly
on Friday is change the sheets on my bed. I do this once a week out of habit, but I’ve done it more
frequently in the past. It
helps that I don’t make my bed; rather, I flip all the sheets to hang
over the footboard and air out. This
keeps the sheets from being all damp when I climb back into them, and,
as I don’t allow visitors into my room, I don’t care what condition
the bed’s in during the day. Then there are the little
housecleaning chores that I deal with on a more frequent basis. Every
dish I dirty at home goes into the dishwasher (or into my dishpan on the
counter) before I go to bed at night. I run the dishwasher overnight
when it’s full, and then empty it while I’m making my oatmeal in the
morning. This means that if
there are dishes in the dishwasher, they’re dirty; I’m never pulling
the clean ones out of the dishwasher to eat off and then leaving them,
dirtied, in the sink, while I wait for the rest of the dishwasher to be
emptied to make room for a new load.
The next big thing I did was
to change the way I approached my laundry.
My old technique involved putting it off until I was down to the
bad underwear, at which point I’d lug a mountain of dirty laundry to
the Laundromat and spend all day (or all night) doing the dreaded chore.
My apartment building had a coin-op washer and dryer on my floor, but I
never used it; the Laundromat had the advantage of letting me do half a
dozen loads simultaneously. After I realized how much time I was
spending cleaning my clothes once every other week or so, I started
doing laundry every time I had a load. The laundry revolution started
when I bought two laundry baskets, one white and one blue.
I separated my whites from my darks as I took them off, rather
than waiting until I had a giant pile of laundry and then figuring out
what I had. This meant that when the dark hamper was full, I’d do a
dark load immediately, and the same for the white wash.
Easy-peasy. In a
week or so, I¹d wash two dark loads and a white load, and that included
my sheets and towels. With little habits like
handling the dishes every day and getting them out of the dishwasher
immediately after they’re clean, doing one load of laundry at a time,
and handling the bathroom while I’m in it anyway, I’ve kept my
household cleaning to under four hours a week.
And I get that little glow of pride when I can open my door to a
guest without hands that smell of bleach. Jill Barrett is a materials engineer who currently works to get more girls interested in engineering. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her brand-new-fiancé, and their shared library. She does not look forward to planning the wedding, even though that's all she talks about nowadays. Really. o ---------------------------> lounge . nourish . host . laze . home. |
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