Category: Homemaking

Hi there, homemaker! Do you ever feel like all of our modern conveniences aren’t as helpful as they seem to be? Perhaps you look at experienced homemakers and wonder how they ever manage to get everything done, when you can barely keep up with the laundry and cooking. (And let’s not talk about cleaning!)

Now, dishwashers and vacuum cleaners have their place, and I sure love my washer and dryer after living without them for a year! I don’t mean to reject all labor-saving devices, but sometimes a simple solution is just… simpler.

And sometimes simpler is better than faster.

I’ve often found more joy in doing something “the old-fashioned way” than by using appliances or electronic devices. Sure, those devices can help you get more things done faster, but I enjoy the satisfaction that comes from doing things yourself and giving a task your best effort.

This list of old fashioned housekeeping tips from an older generation might be just the right amount of labor-saving inspiration!

1. Wear an Apron

Why is it that housewives of past generations considered aprons an essential part of their outfits, but today’s homemakers rarely wear them?

Aprons are both pretty and practical. They protect your clothing from dirt, water, and all kinds of messes. They provide large pockets that are easily accessible — a feature that most women’s clothing lacks.

They can be used in a pinch to wipe little tears, grab a hot lid, dust a shelf, or carry produce in from the garden. I think it’s time to reclaim the uniform of the homemaker, and wear our aprons proudly!

2. Use Simple Cleaning Supplies

If you walk down the cleaning aisle at the supermarket or dollar store, there is an overwhelming array of different products. Our great grandmothers didn’t have all these options, and they cleaned their houses just fine — using common household ingredients that you probably have in your kitchen right now!

Lemons

I love to use lemons for cleaning! They give such a nice fresh scent to surfaces, particularly sinks. If your garbage disposal is getting smelly, toss a lemon peel into it to get rid of the odor.

I wipe down my entire kitchen sink with lemons and baking soda. Then rinse and wipe with a clean cloth. That combination leaves it clean and shining!

You can rub lemons on stainless steel or brass pots or teakettles to remove spots, too.

Baking Soda

You may already use baking soda to remove odors in your refrigerator or car, but did you know that it’s also great for cleaning?

You can clean pretty much the entire kitchen with baking soda and a few extras like vinegar and lemons. Most kitchen surfaces can actually be cleaned with a mixture of baking soda and water: sinks, counters, range hoods, and microwaves.

Baking soda works as a deodorizer for upholstered furniture, rugs, and even mattresses: simply sprinkle some over the surface, wait about 15 minutes, and then vacuum it up.

You can use baking soda in the bathroom too! Sprinkle some on a damp rag or sponge, and wipe down your shower and shower curtain to get rid of mildew.

Salt

Salt is abrasive, so it’s good for scouring. This is handy for cleaning cast iron (which should not be cleaned with soap). Just wet the skillet, pour in a tablespoon or so of salt, and go at it with a damp scrubber or rag.

Salt is also good for cleaning dishes with caked-on messes, or for really getting all the gunk off of your cutting board.

Vinegar

Vinegar is great to use all around the house for cleaning! Use white vinegar or apple cider vinegar, if you prefer that scent.

Wipe down stainless steel appliances, the inside of the dishwasher, and inside your washing machine with a vinegar-soaked rag.

Dilute vinegar with water to clean floors and glass surfaces.

The best way to clean windows is with a vinegar and water solution and newspapers!

Got a clogged drain? Mix vinegar with baking soda, and let that foaming mixture sit in the drain for a few minutes. Follow with plenty of hot water, and you should be all clear.

P.S.~ Here’s a super simple homemade natural cleaner recipe using citrus peels, vinegar, and herbs!

3. Stop dirt at the door

Keep a designated rag or an old towel by the door during spring and summer months to wipe messy bare feet as soon as they come inside, and stop them from tracking dirt all over the house. It also helps on rainy days, to wipe up water from boots or umbrellas.

If you have more than one door leading inside your house, keep one rag at each entrance — or designate one of them as the “messy” entrance, with a big mat for shoes and a rag for wiping up dirt.

4. Consolidate your trips to the grocery store by buying in bulk

Do you ever think about how much time you spend grocery shopping? There’s time spent driving to and from the store, time shopping, time just looking at new things…

It’s not all bad, of course. I look forward to my weekly excursion to the grocery store. But that’s the key point: it’s a weekly trip. Not every other day. The more days you run to the store, the more time you spend shopping.

In order to shop only once per week, you will need to buy a larger amount of food than you would if you normally shop two or three times a week.

To take this one step further, I usually stock up on dry goods on my first shopping trip of the month (or when they go on sale). It’s nice to know that I have enough flour and rice to get through the month, so I don’t have to go through my entire pantry when making a shopping list each week.

Read more grocery shopping tips here!

5. Store dry goods creatively if you don’t have a large pantry

If you’re wondering how in the world to store 20 lbs. of flour when you don’t even have a pantry, don’t fret. I’ve never had a real pantry yet! I hope to one day, but in the meantime, I have found that you can store food in other places just as well.

Garages work well, as long as they don’t get too hot or humid. (Just remember to store food in sturdy containers with tight-fitting lids to deter pests!) Linen closets work fine, or any other storage space you might have.

Of course, the kitchen is the most convenient place to store dry goods; but if you buy in bulk, you can always keep a small jar of something in the kitchen, and the rest in a different location.

My mother has several tall bookcases with doors in her garage, which she uses for extra pantry space. As a child, I was sent down to “Pantry No. 2” all the time to refill a jar of raisins or bring up more flour.

Read more about stocking a pantry here!

6. Save old towels, clothing, and cloth diapers to use as cleaning rags.

Why clean with paper towels if you have old t-shirts or other clothing that can be turned into rags? Rags can be washed and reused again and again — a win for the planet and your pocketbook.

I have found that the best cleaning rags are old, worn-out cloth diapers. They are soft and absorbent, and the holes don’t matter if you’re just using them to clean!

If you don’t have babies in the house, you can save other items of worn-out clothing or linens. T-shirts are easy to come by, but they aren’t very absorbent, and they are not the best for cleaning. I save them for the really messy tasks, so it doesn’t matter if they end up getting thrown away.

7. Show your broom some love

Does your broom look all bent out of shape? Are the bristles frizzy or dirty? Caring for your broom properly will help it to last longer and keep working hard.

Hang your broom instead of standing it up in a corner or closet. This will keep the bristles straight, and they won’t break as easily.

Clean your broom when it starts looking dirty by soaking it in a bucket of warm water with a few drops of ammonia for about an hour.

8. Let your dishes soak

If you’re faced with a pile of pots and pans with burned, caked, or otherwise stuck-on food, you could spend an hour or two scrubbing away. Or, you could soak those extra-dirty dishes in hot, soapy water, and come back to them later.

Give those dishes a good 20-30 minute soak in water almost too hot to touch and plenty of soap. If the food is still stuck on after that, go ahead and leave it to soak overnight. This trick has saved many a homemaker at the end of a long day.

9. Save your old toothbrushes for cleaning

Toothbrushes come in very handy for cleaning. Anywhere you have small spaces or crevices that are hard to clean with a cloth, toothbrushes do a much better job.

Scrub the crevices and corners of your windowsills with a toothbrush dipped in warm water, and dry with a clean cloth.

Clean the grout between shower tiles with a toothbrush, too. It takes some elbow grease, but is very effective! If warm water just won’t cut it, try making a paste of baking soda and water or vinegar. This does the trick every time!

Just make sure to store your cleaning toothbrushes away from little hands! You could consider labeling them too, for the benefit of family members who can read!

10. Clean up while you cook

After enjoying a nice supper or a dinner party with friends, would you rather relax on the sofa or face a sink full of dirty dishes? I’m not advocating leaving those dishes in the sink all night!

But if you have some down time while you’re cooking dinner, it can be a huge help to start washing some dishes early. At least for me, once I sit down at the dinner table, I lose my motivation for housework!

Even if you don’t have all the cooking dishes washed before dinner, every little bit helps. This really goes a long way toward making your evenings more enjoyable.

11. Have a designated laundry day

How did pioneer homemakers stay on top of the family’s laundry, back before they had washing machines and dryers? They had a laundry day, and did it all at once.

Now, you and I probably don’t have to wash our clothes in a giant kettle or use a wringer washer and a washbasin, but this old fashioned housekeeping tip is helpful nonetheless.

If you designate one day of the week as laundry day, and really focus on that task until it’s done, then you don’t even have to think about laundry for the rest of the week! Laundry is not my favorite task, so that’s a big benefit in my book!

The key, of course, is to work on the laundry until it’s actually done, and not leave it halfway done for tomorrow… that’s how the job can drag on all week and make you feel flustered and behind on housework. Nobody wants that!

12. Use the Sun

This is one old fashioned housekeeping tip that should never have been forgotten!

Sunny afternoons do more than just boost your mood and put a smile on your face — although that is a wonderful thing in itself! Sunlight kills some bacteria, and acts as a natural bleach or whitener.

Hang linens out on a line on sunny afternoons to freshen them. Quilts, blankets, comforters, and pillows can all benefit from this! They will smell fresh and clean when you bring them inside.

White linens that are looking rather dingy can be made whiter by hanging them in the sun for several hours.

Hanging cloth diapers on a clothesline on sunny days also helps to get rid of any pesky stains! I know my cloth diapers are always whiter in the summer when I use my clothesline, than in the winter when I use my dryer.

13. Tidy as you go

I set aside one day in my weekly housekeeping schedule for cleaning, but that doesn’t mean I don’t clean anything the rest of the week!

Make it a habit to leave a room tidy when you walk out the door: make your bed before you leave your bedroom in the morning; wash the dishes and wipe down counters after breakfast; straighten the living room before your husband comes home from work; sweep the kitchen floor every night after dinner.

These little habits of keeping things tidy make your house feel more peaceful — and they make less work for you on cleaning day!

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I hope you enjoyed these good old fashioned housekeeping tips! What are some homemade or old fashioned ways you incorporate into your housekeeping?

Happy homemaking!

~Kimberly

Ah, housekeeping! This is the practical side of homemaking. So often, I write about the beauty of creating a welcoming home and the noble role of homemakers, but this is the less glamorous part of the story. However homely, housekeeping is still a very important part of homemaking!

I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a long time, but kept telling myself I don’t have enough experience. Shouldn’t you be hearing this from a homemaker who’s tried every different system and knows for sure which one is best? Or someone with 20 years of experience?

I’ve only been at this homemaking game for 4 years, and my housekeeping was pretty haphazard before that. However, I have tried several different approaches to housekeeping, and I want to share with you the one that finally worked for me!

First, a note on comparing yourself to others

Homemaking is hard work, but it’s not drudgery. You don’t have to run around from morning till night and never take any time for yourself.

If you don’t have children, your housekeeping will look different than your sister who has three little kids. You might not be as busy as she is; that’s okay!

Don’t compare yourself to someone else in a different situation and think that you’re not a good homemaker because you don’t bake three loaves of bread or two pans of lasagna at once. As long as supper’s on the table and you’re keeping a balance of work, prayer, and leisure, you’ll be all right.

Schedules bring order to your chaos

Following a weekly housekeeping schedule helps to balance my life. Routines are always good for creating structure, and structure is so helpful at home.

(If you’re interested in routines for meal planning, or how to make a meal plan, see these posts!)

If you’re just transitioning into the role of a homemaker, you may feel overwhelmed by everything there is to do. Or you might find your days slipping away somehow, but feel like you’re not accomplishing anything. I know that’s how I felt at first.

If you go from a full-time student or a job outside of the home to being a full-time homemaker, you’re probably used to the structure of your school or workplace.

As a homemaker, you have the privilege of setting up your own structure! This is a great privilege, and a responsibility. Nobody else is telling you how to manage your time, so you have to figure it out on your own. If you’ve never done that, it can be frustrating or even overwhelming.

Take a deep breath. You can do this! It just takes time to experiment and find out what works for you and what doesn’t. Here are the top reasons why I find a weekly schedule so helpful.

1. I don’t like laundry

My main reason for starting a weekly housekeeping schedule in the first place was that I don’t like doing laundry. I’ve heard many people recommend starting a load of laundry first thing every morning.

Now, I’m glad that method works for them, but to me it sounds like: “Let’s make the whole week stressful and frustrating by turning laundry into a never-ending chore that you have to look at every day.”

No, thank you! I want to do all the laundry in one go, and forget about it for the rest of the week! Enter the weekly housekeeping schedule.

It allows me to focus on laundry one day per week, instead of trying to get all the housework done in one or two days–which invariably means I’ll have a pile of laundry waiting around for me to fold it until I finish everything else!

Small side note:

I don’t count washing diapers as part of my regular laundry. For one thing, I usually don’t have time in one day to wash all the laundry plus a load of diapers in our small washing machine! For another, I wash diapers at least twice per week right now (2 kids in diapers at the moment). So I definitely can’t wash diapers once a week and be done with it!

2. Focus… focus!

My weekly housekeeping schedule helps me to focus on one task until it’s finished. I can write a to-do list a mile long, especially on Mondays. But looking at a long list puts me in a state of mild desperation, and makes me feel like I have to get everything done by the end of the day.

If I try to tackle every chore in the same day, I often end up running on to the next without completely finishing the first one! Keep doing that all day, and I end up exhausted with half the work still undone.

That is so discouraging! It almost seems worse than if I hadn’t even tried to do any housework. At least then I wouldn’t be worn out from running around in circles!

When I stick to my schedule, there are no tachycardia-inducing long lists. Each chore takes longer when you only do it once a week, to be sure: if you only bake one day out of the week, you’ll need to make more bread than you would if you bake every other day.

But I find it much easier to stay on task and focus on my one or two housekeeping tasks per day, rather than try to do ten quick little jobs.

3. You don’t need to remember everything anymore

It’s harder to miss tasks when you write them down ahead of time. Before I made a housekeeping schedule, some things didn’t get cleaned until they were dirty enough to make me stop whatever I was doing and go clean them.

I don’t like living in messy spaces, but laziness gets the best of me if I don’t intentionally prevent it from doing so! It’s always easier in the moment to say, “Oh, the bathroom can wait another day. Let’s go take advantage of this sunny afternoon and go for a walk!”

I’m not saying you should never be spontaneous or have fun, but if you do that too often, your house will begin to look unkempt. I would rather go for a walk after my house is cleaned, rather than return to a mess. Most days.

Occasional housekeeping tasks

What about those chores that don’t need to be done every week? Things like cleaning your oven or vacuum cleaner filter are easy to forget because they seem less urgent.

That’s where a housekeeping schedule can really shine. You can set aside one day for rotating through several different chores that are less frequently needed.

That way, you have a plan, it’s written down, and so you don’t have to keep details — such as when you last rotated your mattress — in your head.

Having a plan takes away so much stress of trying to remember everything that needs to be done! I love finding ways to make my life more peaceful, and writing down tasks on a schedule definitely helps!

Objections to a weekly housekeeping schedule

Maybe you don’t want the restrictions of assigning certain chores to each day. Perhaps you like to let your days flow freely, and cook and clean when you’re in the right mood.

I get that. Sometimes I’ll switch my schedule up and clean on Monday instead of Friday because that’s what I feel like tackling.

But for me, living in a constant state of ambiguity is exhausting. I love to be spontaneous and do fun things, but I also appreciate the slow and steady rhythm of life at home.

My husband and I like spontaneous weekend road trips a lot. We can pack food, kids, and camping gear and hit the road in a couple of hours. I learned early on in our marriage that it is not fun to come home after such a trip to a messy house. It’s much better to unload the car and put the kids to bed in a tidy, serene space!

But if I was saving all of my chores for the weekend, I can’t do that. This is where a weekly housekeeping schedule comes in. If I do all of my housework while my husband is at work, then we can relax and enjoy each others’ company when he comes home.

Now, please don’t think I’m a perfect wife who always has the house tidy and supper on the table when her husband walks in the door! I don’t always accomplish what I plan to do, but that is my goal.

It can’t hurt to try something new

I encourage you to try a weekly housekeeping schedule, even if you think it might not be for you. I know that there are lots of different ways to keep house, and this one might not be a great fit for everyone.

If that’s the case, well, you probably learned something about yourself by trying it. The point is to keep trying different things until you find a method that works for your madness!

I would recommend giving yourself at least three weeks to really see if this will work for you, before you quit. The first week you try might be a holiday, or maybe someone gets sick and you get off kilter for a few days. Three weeks should be sufficient to judge whether or not it’s a good fit.

There’s a season for everything

You’ll also probably find that what works well in one season of your life needs some adjustment when you begin a new season.

I first tried a weekly housekeeping schedule after my first child was born and I desperately needed structure in my life! My sleep-deprived brain couldn’t remember what it was supposed to be doing unless it had a visual reminder.

So I made a simple schedule and posted it on the inside of a cupboard door in my kitchen. Fast forward three years and another baby, and my schedule is definitely different.

There will be more changes as children grow, families move into new homes, parents take different jobs, etc. Life is constantly changing: sometimes in big ways, but always in little ones that are barely noticeable.

Having a schedule for housekeeping allows me to think about it less, and focus more on my family. That is the purpose of housekeeping and homemaking after all, isn’t it? To provide a clean, tidy, cheerful home for one’s family?

I would rather spend more time enjoying my family in such clean, tidy home than running around trying to clean and tidy it! Having a schedule keeps me on track so that I never get too far behind and the house starts slipping into too much disarray.

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I hope this inspires you to try out a weekly housekeeping schedule and see if it works for you. I’ll be sharing how to set up your own schedule soon, so check back in a few days!

Happy homemaking!

~Kimberly