Last Wednesday, I mentioned Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts in passing. I discovered it a few years ago in one of those random research threads that I occasionally follow and purchased my own copy when I realized that I had found the most definitive housekeeping manual on the planet. This brick is 906 pages long—and I read the entire thing.
Most people shouldn’t read it all the way through. Some chapters legitimately lost me, like the one that explains the chemistry behind why some homemade cleaners work and others don’t. The greatest gift of having read the entire book wasn’t the information that I promptly forgot, but the underlying philosophy it adopts towards housekeeping: Housekeeping is about living well. A big part of why good cleaning habits can be hard to build is because we tend to see it as an externally imposed duty. What I loved about Home Comforts was its focus on cleaning not because others say you should or because you have a “standard” to meet, but because you want to enjoy your home. You want to live well, and living well doesn’t just happen by accident. There are two ways to build cleaning habits: routines and schedules. Both are intentional and can be adapted to changing circumstances. As a person with an irregular schedule, I find routines to be very powerful for the things that need to be done most often. For example, every day but Sabbath I have a routine where I feed the cats, refresh their water, do their boxes, and sweep the hard floors—in that order. Because it’s tied to something I can’t forget to do without loud, shrieky reminders (feed the cats), I stay pretty well on top of it. Before I tied these other tasks to feeding the cats, I had a really hard time reminding myself to do the cat boxes, and lacked the willpower to do it if I went too long without doing them. Sweeping made sense to add to that routine because the floor that needs it most often has a cat box on it. To be honest, I cheat a little to help myself out by using a handy little app called Habitica for accountability. It’s a game in which your character levels up and defeats monsters when you do your good habits and get stuff done but takes damage if you don’t. (You can rest your character if you’re sick or traveling, of course.) I find this helpfully motivational when I’m starting a new habit, but once I’ve been doing the routine for a while, I don’t need the external help anymore. Tying cleaning tasks to things that happen regularly is a powerful way to remind yourself to do them. Traditionally, Adventists (and long before us, Jews) clean house on Friday afternoon to be ready for Sabbath. Some seasons of the year, this is unrealistic because you will not get home from work before sundown, even though you got off of work beforehand. In my case, Friday can be crazy if circumstances keep me from preparing properly for my Sabbath work earlier in the week. Now that most of us are working from home and it’s summer anyway, this is a little easier to do. I would not recommend placing all the week’s cleaning on Friday afternoon, though: you’re tired from the week and you want to enjoy the Sabbath. Do just enough on Friday to be able to enjoy Sabbath when it comes. For me, this tends to mean at least zeroing out the dishes, and I really ought to be cleaning one of the bathrooms while my husband is vacuuming, rather than cowering in a quieter part of the house like a twitchy cat. As a pastor I see homes in a variety of states of cleanliness (or lack thereof), and the home that impressed me most was a family of two working parents with two young children whose place looked nearly spotless. I was astonished, and took a risk to ask about it. One of the little ones cheerfully told me, “Oh, we clean it every Sunday!” I like that. On Sunday, you’ve had a day of rest (unless you’re an essential weekend worker) and you’re not in quite as much of a hurry as you would be on Friday afternoon. Ever since college, I’ve been doing my laundry on Sundays or, in the case of the odd busy Sunday, as early in the week as possible. That way, I don’t have to worry about finding clothes the rest of the week. This is also a great day for making large batches of cooking to eat off of during the busier parts of the week. For tasks that don’t need to be done every day or every week, scheduling is useful. My editor mentioned to me her parents’ strategy for regular deep cleaning that I think is kind of genius. Once a month, they schedule a day to deep clean a room together and rotate through the different rooms of the house over the course of the year. I love this for a variety of reasons, but the one thing worth mentioning first is that if you keep walking past a mess you don’t have time to deal with (like the boxes in the garage or the pile of bills on the kitchen table), you’ll constantly have this burden of guilt nagging at you. If you schedule a time to deal with it when you know you will have time to do it properly, you don’t have to feel guilty as life keeps you too busy to deal with it in the moment. The other reason I love this strategy is because it involves communicating with the other people who use the space. When you live with others, whether it’s a simple room mate arrangement or a large three-generation household, cleaning is a relational thing. In our next post, we will discuss that piece of the puzzle. Before you drag others into it, though, you need to make up your mind that cleaning is worth doing to enjoy life on your terms, not just because of those other people you live with. This is not about drudgery to appease them, but about creating a space that you personally like to inhabit. This is about living well.
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AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
May 2020
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