Keeping house

An older woman I used to know (of my parent’s generation) and looked up to quite a bit once said the following about housework:

In the morning when your brain is most productive, first do the things that are
important to you – read, work, plan, be creative – then make housework the thing
you do last.

This is coming from the perspective of someone who once perhaps was a stay-at-home mum with regular house cleaning schedule, moving back into working life. I have not been a stay-at-home mum yet, and have always been a bit of mess-pot. Regardless, over the past 7-8 years I embraced the attitude that “housework is unimportant compared to everything else” and now find my house in such a disordered state that it is stressing me out. Yes, I now realise that the intention of this quote is not “don’t bother with housework at all”, it is just saying “refocus your priorities so that housework is not at the fore”, which it really never has been for me.

For the record, the same woman also was strongly of the opinion that:

If your house is in disorder, what can you expect your guests to think of your
mental state?

Our house is so messy lately that a big clean up is in order. The mess is exacerbated due to the smallness of our house. This is both of our faults (although C-chan is naturally tidier than me), as we both have a habit of stashing things in piles and thinking “we’ll sort that out later”. Then a few weeks later, there are countless “deal with me later” piles appearing on coffee tables, dinner table, desk, kitchen bench, and on the floor that are suddenly saying “deal with me now” but you can’t because you are too busy right then…

To keep things in perspective, we’re not as bad as those people on "today tonight" who have rooms floor to ceiling full of junk overflowing into their back yard, attracting vermin and complaints from neighbours because of the visual eyesore!! But it is messier and less organised than we would like, which is the important matter here.

I’d rather my house was tidy with minimal maintenance required so I can be more preoccupied with important stuff – I don’t want clutter to interfere with my sense of mental order like it is currently. There are 2 options – firstly, get a cleaner between now and when the bub is born… a cleaner would keep the regular mess at bay, but is not really going to solve everything as we still need to get rid of a lot of stuff and rearrange our possessions to fit the changes a 3rd member of the household is going to require. My second – and more likely – option is to change my attitude to housework and make it a higher priority, and to do a little bit right away, and regularly.

This sounds like the most boring personal goal I could possibly ever conceive of! But there are other things to think about, like the additional chaos a baby is going to bring, and setting a good example for the little’un. We’ve decided to break down the big clean up into a series of small tasks, and hope to start on some of these this weekend.