Top Tips for housework

Today I thought I’d share with your my Top Tips for housework as you know I am a housewife extraoardinaire – juggling two young children, a husband who selfishly works from home, two cats and four fish. I love to blog, which means the housework may suffer a tiny bit, but never mind.

My Top Tip is – pay someone else to do it. Seriously. I hope that doesn’t come across as terribly middle-class but it’s what we did whilst we could afford it. Unfortunately, we had a run of awful cleaners. I don’t believe any of them were actually cleaners, the only paperwork they had was in a different language, but that was the only work they could get. It was fine whilst I was pregnant and concentrating on growing babies but, after my youngest was born I could no longer watch the cleaner doing some light dusting and ignoring the huge dirty marks left by the toddler.

I hate confrontation so tried to hint that some jobs needed doing but in the end just decided I could squeeze the cleaning in between nappy changes, running the household, planning meals and keeping on top of the pile of washing. I’ve managed for the last couple of months but it is hard work.

So if you can’t afford a cleaner here are my top tips

• break the housework into manageable chunks, hoovering one day, bathrooms the next, dusting and polishing one day, empty bins, change sheets and towels – routine works for me
• recycle and reduce your waste, we save a lot of our recycling for crafty projects
• cover every possible surface in toys, clothes to be put away and half-finished paintings, this means there will be less surfaces for dust to fall on, therefore less cleaning is required
• buy as many labour-saving devices as possible, my dishwasher was a wedding present and well worth getting married for
• involve your children so they learn that cleaning can be fun (I’m aiming to teach my son so he’s not averse to cleaning like his father)

ahem, child labour