Organising your life: chores

Welcome to this five day series organised by Caroline at the Joyful Keeper. This is all about organising life. I'm a learner at this and am looking forward to learning from the other ladies who are posting. Some of these posts will be ideas that have worked well for me and others are more about where I would like to be! I will try to be clear about what has definitely worked and what is just aspirational.

The topics are

• spiritual life
• laundry
• chores
• meals
• home-schooling

Today, I'm talking about chores.

Let me start by saying that this isn't something that I'm proud about! 

I've never been a great cleaner. For many years, whilst I was working outside the home, I employed cleaners. Some were great, some were less than great and a few were scary! It isn't the best of ideas to vacuum a wet floor. Whilst I am delighted to be at home, in many ways, lack of a professional cleaner isn't something that makes me glad. 

The other result of having a cleaner was that training my children to do chores wasn't high on the agenda. 

When I reduced my hours dramatically, after Youngest Son was born, the cleaner went and of course, now I do no work outside the home, I'm the cleaner. Let's be honest, cleaning doesn't come high on the "want to list". It ranks below

• talking to my husband
• talking to the children
• reading to the children
• home education
• cooking
• laundry
• writing, of course.

The next difficulty, is that we have a reasonable size house to accommodate eight people and a husband who works from home so to clean the house properly would take probably about eight uninterrupted hours each week. 

Of course, the answer is to give the children chores, lots of, but in reality this would just be provoking them. They weren't used to chores, would have to do a serious number and some have concerns about the drop in income with me at home so adding extra tasks is adding insult to injury.

So what do we do? Well, the house isn't as clean as it might be. However, there are certain priorities: the kitchen and bathrooms and obscurely, the stair carpet. Actually, the children do help. Middle Son cleans his room, Youngest Son loves to vacuum although at this season he needs loads of supervision and all the children muck in and help when visitors are due to arrive.

If you are, like me, a poor housewife, I would commend regular visitors-they focus the mind and quicken the pace. 

If you have any helpful tips for a dreadful cleaner and housewife, I shall be grateful!!

This blog hop has been arranged by Caroline of the Joyful Keeper.


The others taking part can be found by clicking on the blog buttons below.

Please join us. There will be opportunities to comment and Caroline has a linky for your posts on organising your chores.