Modern Homemaking 101: The Basics

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What skills does a homemaker need to learn? If you’re just starting out as a new homemaker, you might well be wondering about homemaking basics. Maybe you’re picturing Ma Ingalls or a ’50s housewife as the ideal homemaker, but those images don’t fit very well with your current lifestyle.

Do you imagine yourself in an apron and pumps, coolly and efficiently cooking elegant dinners and delectable desserts every day? Sewing and knitting clothes for your family? Growing a huge garden and canning fresh produce to enjoy all year?

Talk about overwhelming! That sounds like a lot to learn, even if you already know how to do some of those things.

Don’t get discouraged by this image. You don’t need to know how to do all this to be a homemaker- even an accomplished homemaker.

Of course the specific skills you’ll need will vary a bit depending on your lifestyle, but let’s take a look at the skills which make up the homemaking basics. I’ve grouped specific skills together under the three general responsibilities of a homemaker.

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Feed your Family

This is the first and most important part of a homemaker’s job. Why? Simple: you and your family need to eat every day; and as the homemaker, you are responsible for making that happen.

The size of your family doesn’t really make a difference when it comes down to the skills you need. Whether you have two mouths to feed or ten, the basic processes are the same.

Skills you will need to accomplish this task include meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking. These are the homemaking basics you need to feed your family.

Additional skills you may want to learn are freezer or batch cooking, baking, bread making, home dairy, and traditional or gourmet cooking methods. Then there’s the entire realm of growing your own food and preserving it. You can probably think of even more skills that I haven’t listed.

These are great was to expand your skill set and get creative once you’ve mastered the basics, but they aren’t necessary at the beginning. If you’re just starting out, there’s no need to tackle these in addition to basic meal planning and cooking.

Meal Planning

There are many different methods of meal planning. You can plan a week or a month at a time. You can use cookbooks, online recipe sites, or meal planning services. There are apps and printable menus to organize your planning. It can get overwhelming, and it’s easy to feel like you’re doing it wrong if you’re not following this or that specific plan.

If you’ve tried one or more methods and they just aren’t working, please don’t think you’re a failure. It takes time to set up any new habit, and meal planning is no exception.

I still have weeks when a meal plan doesn’t ever fully materialize due to life’s unpredictable twists. Your schedule may be so fluid that it’s really difficult to find time for cooking, let alone plan out a week in advance.

I hear you. But it will help to implement some sort of plan for your meals, even if it’s only planning which nights to order takeout because your schedule is so hectic.

If you would like to learn how to start a meal plan, read Easing into Meal Planning. If you’re still skeptical about its benefits, read Why You Should Have A Simple Meal Plan.

Grocery Shopping

Is this really a skill? It sure is! Whether you’re shopping on a tight budget, working with special diets, or just trying to use up your produce before it rots, everyone meets some kind of challenge with grocery shopping.

Maybe you live in the middle of nowhere, and you have to drive an hour or two to get to a decent grocery store. Maybe you have a baby or two in tow, and just pushing a shopping cart seems like a chore.

Or maybe you’ve never really given grocery shopping much thought, and you’re secretly terrified of it. You buy what you like at the store, and then don’t always know what to do with it once you get home. (I’ve definitely done that, especially when pregnant!)

In any of these scenarios, learning the basics of grocery shopping and setting up your own system can be a huge relief, as well as allow you to spend your time wisely.

Cooking

Ah, cooking. This goes on every list of homemaking basics. It’s usually a big concern for any new homemaker, and no wonder! If you’ve recently quit the working world, you may have been living on takeout or mac’n’cheese for months or years.

Frozen meals and prepared selections from the grocery store are convenient, but expensive. If you’ve embraced homemaking as your current career, then cooking will very likely be a part of your job.

Cooking is a broad category, so don’t start out by trying to learn everything all at once. Tackling a complicated meal when you’re inexperienced is a sure way to frustrate yourself. Start with what you already know how to do, and build slowly from there.

For example, if you can scramble eggs in a skillet, then try a similar skill like stir-frying. The ingredients are different, but the technique is similar. This allows you to build new skills from basics you already know.

It’s tempting to look at a recipe and say, “That looks tasty. I want to make it!” And while there’s nothing wrong with this approach, it’s a very scattered way to learn how to cook. You might find yourself in over your head- even if you don’t consider yourself a novice cook anymore.

A better way to learn to cook is to focus on mastering specific skills. What do I mean by that? Well, if you want to learn to cook meat, then different skills to learn would be roasting, pan frying, searing, grilling, stewing, and so on.

Where to Start

So which skills do you start with, and how do you actually learn them? As far as which skills to learn first, everyone has his own opinion. I like this list, which is tailored to young adults.

If you’re looking for help with certain skills, good news: there are a lot of resources out there. From full-blown cooking classes to quick video tutorials, you can find so much information online.

If you prefer to read instructions and look at pictures instead of video, then how-to cookbooks might be more your cup of tea. Many cookbooks have cooking guides included with the recipes.

One of my favorites is the Land O’ Lakes Treasury of Country Recipes. At the end of each recipe section, there is a detailed photo guide on how to prepare and cook the ingredients in that chapter.

I find it helpful because it gives you the skills along with different recipe suggestions, whereas a cooking class teaches skills as part of a specific recipe (which you don’t get to choose).

Here are more of my favorite cookbooks, from beginner to advanced.

Clothe your Family

Before you protest, I am not talking about hand sewing, knitting, crocheting, or weaving here. Those are great skills, and they can be quite useful, but for most modern homemakers they are not necessary.

What goes into clothing your family in this day and age? Buying clothes (or making them, if you wish), washing clothes, ironing, and mending are all basic skills a homemaker should learn. The others are extra: great if you want to learn them, but definitely beyond homemaking basics.

Buying Clothes

Just like grocery shopping, buying clothes is a skill. Finding quality garments is hard enough these days. Finding them at a reasonable price takes great skill and patience.

If you don’t have any kids, then that might sound foreign to you. It did to me, but I have come to appreciate quality clothing more since getting married and starting a family.

When I first became a homemaker, I didn’t see how buying clothes could be a skill. Keeping myself from buying clothes I didn’t need seemed to be more important. I’ve learned a few lessons along the way, and I’m slowly changing my approach to buying clothes for myself and my family.

Laundry

Doing the laundry correctly is a very important skill to learn. If you toss everything into the washing machine and dryer in a jumble, you’ll quickly find yourself with faded or discolored garments, permanent stains, or even damaged or shrunken items.

A good place to start is by reading the tags on each piece of clothing before you wash it. Believe it or not, every garment tells you how to wash it right on the tag! Then you can sort your laundry by cycle type, water temperature, and/or color.

For example, you might make one pile of garments to be washed on a delicate cycle. Another pile might be work clothes to be washed in cold water on a heavy duty cycle.

Besides learning how to properly wash garments, you also have to keep up with it! I know I’ve been guilty of putting off doing the laundry until the last possible day, and then it becomes a big job.

Of course, if you’re only doing the laundry for one or two people, it may not be such a big job. Laundry becomes more time-consuming when you’re doing it for several people.

So if you’re just starting out in marriage and homemaking, relax! You have some time to learn how to do laundry correctly before it starts to take up a lot of time.

Ironing

Ironing seems to be one of those chores that most people have an extreme aversion to. I think it must be because they don’t really know how. Once you get the hang of it, ironing is really quite simple. (Unless you’re ironing sofa slipcovers–ugh!)

If you don’t have an ironing board, you can usually find them in thrift stores. You might not want to store a bulky ironing board, but it really does make the job easier and more enjoyable.

Just like laundry, the first step is to check the garment tag. If it says, “Cool iron if necessary,” you’ll know not to put the iron on its highest setting. Many irons mark their settings by type of fabric to make things easy for you.

If you’re confused, look in the owner’s manual (or do a quick Google search). When in doubt, it’s always better to start on a lower setting to avoid scorching your clothing.

One other quick note about ironing: if your tap water has a high mineral content, you may want to buy bottled purified water to use in your iron. The minerals in hard water can cause buildup in an iron, which can leave residue on your clothes and ultimately shorten its life.

Mending

Just because you don’t plan on making your own clothes doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a basic knowledge of sewing.

Life happens, and if you don’t want to throw away your favorite top when the stitching comes loose or a button falls off, knowing how to wield a needle and thread could come in very handy!

I’m not telling you to take a six-week sewing class. By basic mending skills, I really do mean basic. It’s helpful to know how to:

• sew on a button
• mend a tear
• sew on a patch
• hem pants or a skirt

That list of homemaking basics for clothing doesn’t seem overwhelming, does it? You don’t even need a sewing machine for those simple tasks (although it can help).

Keep your House in Order

While the first two responsibilities of a homemaker focused on the family members, the third one focuses on the house itself. Whether you live in a modern apartment or a rustic cabin, a tiny trailer or a huge mansion, you need to take care of your home.

No matter where you live, there are some basic skills you need to know. The size of house only affects the magnitude of these tasks: cleaning, organization, maintenance, and home finances.

If you want to expand beyond these homemaking basics, you can get into the fields of interior decorating, landscaping and decorative gardening. That’s where it gets really fun! But first, start with the basics.

Cleaning

Every house needs to be cleaned, no matter how small or large it is. Some things should be cleaned on a daily or weekly basis, while others don’t get dirty as fast and may be cleaned only once or twice per year.

When you’re learning how to clean, the natural progression is to clean the dirtiest areas first, and gradually move to the less dirty (or less visible) areas.

You can find myriads of checklists and cleaning tutorials online (I recommend Pinterest). The only caution I have is this: don’t think you have to choose a plan and stick to it forever.

I’ve used different cleaning schedules over the last several years. I don’t currently use a specific schedule, and my house still gets cleaned. So if you can’t stick to one person’s tried-and-true method, don’t sweat it. Just do what you can each day.

Organizing

Cleaning is easier if your house is generally organized, and vice versa.

Organizing is grouping together the things you own so that everything in your house has a place. That doesn’t mean everything will always be in its proper place, but it means you don’t have things floating aimlessly around your house (clutter).

When you move into a new place, the first few days feel very chaotic because none of your things seem to have a place in the new space. As you gradually find places for everything, you feel that you are really moving in.

Sometimes that’s where organizing stops. But what if the first place you found for your quilts or your teapots isn’t actually the best place? What if your pots and pans could be organized better so they aren’t always a mess?

The goal of organizing is reducing clutter and messes when everything is put away where it belongs. Sometimes this means completely rethinking how you have organized your belongings; other times it just means reorganizing one specific space or category of things.

This year, I started using the KonMari method of tidying, and so far I’m very satisfied with it. There are plenty of other methods if you don’t fancy a total overhaul like this; just keep the end goal in mind, and you’ll be fine.

Home Maintenance

Home maintenance is taking care of the place you live in, and its larger moving parts.

This applies to the physical structure of your house (if you own it), as well as the care and maintenance of appliances and furnishings.

Sometimes these are big tasks, like painting the interior or exterior of your house. Sometimes basic maintenance is quick and simple, like properly turning off and cleaning a propane heater for the summer.

Taking care of your home and maintaining it properly are essential to keep it in good running order. Do you really want to live in a place where the dishwasher doesn’t work, half the light bulbs are burnt out, and the roof leaks?

You could argue that this doesn’t belong on the list of homemaking basics: that your husband takes care of all of these things. If you’re married, it’s true that you probably won’t have to tackle these tasks alone.

But as a homemaker, you do need to take some responsibility. You’re the one who’s home most of the time, so you will probably be around when things break.

I speak from experience. Rarely do major problems happen when my husband is home to deal with them.

I’m not great at this kind of thing, but I do see how important it is. Even if I have no idea how to fix a water pipe that burst, I can figure out how to turn the water off so that the problem doesn’t get much worse before help arrives.

Home Finances

By home finances, I mean keeping track of household expenses. I know that not every homemaker holds the purse strings; but I think it’s still important to keep on the list of homemaking basics.

Even if you aren’t the one balancing the checkbook, you can still keep receipts and important papers so your spouse will have an easier time doing the math.

Why is it important to keep track of household expenses if you live within your means? Well, because it shows you where your money goes. It shows you how expensive your house is to live in and maintain.

This knowledge is important when you’re making big decisions about buying a new home (or other significantly expensive item), having a baby, or getting a different job.

It also should show you the difference between your necessary expenses and unnecessary purchases. I’m not saying you should necessarily cap your spending, but budgeting can show you areas where you can save if, indeed, you are trying to save money.

Keeping track of home finances doesn’t have to mean budgeting, although that is a useful method. There are others. At one point, I simply kept a spreadsheet to track expenses so that I could tell at a glance how much money I had spent in a given month, and what I spent it on.

Even if you start out by saving the receipts from appliances and other large purchases, that’s something. The ultimate goal is to make the financial landscape of your household clear to both you and your spouse.

Homemaking Basics: Tools in your Toolbox

As a homemaker, your job has many responsibilities. You’ll probably find yourself wearing several different hats, so it’s a good idea to learn the basic skills you’ll need early on.

If you learn at least the rudiments of these skills, you won’t be as frustrated by unexpected problems. They are like tools in a toolbox: you may not need them all right away, but you’ll be glad to have them when a pipe starts leaking.

Where do you go from here? If you enjoyed this article and would like to receive more tips about homemaking basics in your inbox, I invite you to subscribe to my email newsletter!

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