Outwitting Housework: 101 Cunning Stratagems to Reduce Your Housework to a Minimum

By Barty Phillips

Entertaining and packed full of time-saving tips, Outwitting Housework is an essential guide to making your house gleam without breaking a sweat. Household expert Barty Phillips shares her clever tips for avoiding chores wherever possible, revealing her sanity-saving shortcuts and creative advice for keeping those boring tasks to a minimum.

Discover what basic tools of the trade you need and how to use them to bring sparkle, shine and a sense of calm to your home. Learn how to do effective minimal tidying, train errant family members and engage technology to help save you even more effort.

Armed with these cunning and creative stratagems, you'll soon be drying off those rubber gloves and doing something much more fun instead.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael O'Mara
• Release date: Jun 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781782439264

Book preview

Index

INTRODUCTION

There’s no getting away from it – if you have a home, it will need some housework. But you can avoid much of it by using low cunning to forestall incipient chaos, gathering dust, ingrained stains and pet hairs nestling on your best black trousers.

You sometimes hear people boast about staying in a hotel that was so clean ‘you could eat your dinner off the bathroom floor’. Luckily, I have never wanted to eat my dinner off any floor in my home, but I still want everything underfoot (and everywhere else for that matter) to look attractive and feel clean. ‘How clean?’ is the question, and that will depend on you and whether you have only yourself to please or if you are living with other people whose requirements are rather different from your own; a partner who is irritated by your crumbs on the tablecloth, say, or a child who carelessly scatters packet-loads of cereal everywhere at breakfast time.

In general, the tidier the home, the easier it is to keep housework at bay. But with the best will in the world, you are not going to prevent the cat from shedding hairs on the sofa, or your nearest and dearest walking in with muddy boots or scattering mobiles, games consoles or half-eaten wraps under every cushion. Your best hope for outwitting housework nowadays is to relax about it. If you don’t have to scrub and polish, don’t. If a cleaning product requires to be left for a length of time after you’ve applied it, leave it; go away, forget about it, do something nice, listen to some music, dance in front of the mirror. The product will quietly get on with its work and all you have to do is forget about it until it has done its job.

At least these days we don’t have to cope with that thing our ancestors used to call ‘spring cleaning’ in which not only did every piece of furniture have to be removed to the middle of the room and covered with dust sheets, so that the surfaces under and behind them could be scrubbed, but the curtains had to be changed from ‘winter’ heavyweight woven woollen ones, to lightweight ‘summer’ cotton; the upholstery and carpets had to be taken outside and beaten with specially woven cane carpet beaters to within an inch of their lives.

My copy of Every Woman’s Enquire Within: A Complete Library of Household Knowledge for all Home-loving Women published in 1940 by George Newnes minutely details how this should be done, including ‘advance preparation’ (such as turning out all the drawers in every chest and cleaning their contents), then polishing the furniture, removing dust with a vacuum cleaner ‘if you have one’ – otherwise ‘a brush must be used instead’. Oh, and, of course, you had to get the chimney swept, too.

With modern surfaces and finishes, modern vacuum and carpet cleaners, grease-busting cloths, and no coal-burning fires to leave soot and smuts over everything, the most noticeable spring-cleaning job necessary for us today is getting rid of the smears and splatters on window panes highlighted by the first rays of the new year’s sun.

As a person who feels there are more interesting things to do in the world than housework blitzes, I have spent a lifetime trying to find ways of avoiding any need for spring cleaning by keeping a clean, tidy and efficient home while using up the least possible time and energy. And in this book I’d like to share some of these discoveries with you. It is by no means a comprehensive how-to-do-everything book, but I hope it will offer schemes and strategies to outwit the chaos and grime lurking in every home and waiting to pounce. I don’t advocate striving for perfection, which inevitably leads to disappointment and a feeling of failure, but for comfort and a vague sense of control, saving time and energy and allowing yourself the occasional luxury of lounging in tidy comfort on the sofa to watch a complete evening of your favourite TV.

1

CONTROLLING TECHNOLOGY

Technology, we are told, has revolutionized our lives and made the stresses of housework more or less a thing of the past. Unfortunately, the very technology itself often seems to require rather more effort and time than the ordinary cleaning and dusting that preceded it. Tempting though it may be to buy the latest, shiniest and most advertised equipment, my advice is – get what’s right for you. If you spend your time on your smartphone, then remote-controlled electronic devices that will draw your living-room curtains at the press of a button may be the ideal thing. But if you are baffled by the digital controls of your central heating, you certainly won’t want a remote-controlled washing machine or robo vac. So, when buying your equipment don’t let your advisers drag you kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century unless you are going to understand and enjoy it. Many houseworkers still prefer simple knobs to digital controls, and digital controls can themselves be simple or complicated. If you are a technophobe, go for the simplest of programming devices that will be quick to master.

Outwitting your equipment

It’s easy to be seduced by bulky and attractive packaging and become rather distracted from the actual object you’re buying and its suitability for you and your home. Machines come in sizes varying from petite to giant, and big is often not best. One Christmas, for example, a friend of mine was given a wonderful Rolls Royce-grade toaster. It was coated in shiny silver metal, had four slots, a special programme for muffins and sophisticated timing technology. She lives on her own and only eats toast very occasionally. She has been trying ever since to give it back to the family who gifted it to her, as she is sure it would be of far more use to them, but they are happy to have given her something so wonderful. In a similar vein, I’m a short person and if I get the usual sort of squeegee for window cleaning, the short handle will not let me reach the top of my windows. Also, a large bucket is just no good for me, as I can’t lift it when it’s full. On their own, these things sound very trivial, but if you consider that they will be used regularly, it’s important that they work for you.

For a large family, robust is almost certainly better than digitally advanced. An uncomplicated object that doesn’t come in many parts will get much more use than one that takes hours to master and assemble. I once attended a London trade exhibition of white goods. One of the machines on show was a wonderfully simple washing machine that just tumbled the clothes and had two knobs: off/on and a timer. I asked the rep where you could get this desirable machine. ‘Oh!’ he said, ‘I’m afraid it’s not available in this country; it’s for the Third World.’ I felt bereft – on my readers’ behalf as well as my own. I now have a machine with eight programmes of which I probably use two.

Get your vacuum cleaner onside

If you live in a large and open space, such as a loft apartment, and have miles of carpet and not too much furniture to get in the way, why not get a professional-quality upright vacuum, which will last for decades and get the job done efficiently and quickly (though it may be a mite noisier than other vacuums). A commercial machine is likely to be longer lasting and more effective than a domestic one and may be a good buy for larger homes and families, depending on their interests and activities. It will generally be made of more robust materials and will have fewer little pretty bits to fall off. Also, it will usually be bigger, heavier and more expensive than domestic machines. A wide-track vacuum cleaner would be useful in an open, unobstructed space because you’d cover more floor area with each pacing of the room.

A wet-and-dry vacuum cleaner might be good for a family of teenagers. These machines will suck up anything from sawdust and nails to a flood caused by overflowing bath water. Instead of a vacuum bag, a wet-and-dry machine has two compartments, one for liquids and one for dry dirt. Each machine needs a foam filter for liquids and a paper filter for dry stuff, and you must remember that these will need switching over every time you change the function of the machine. You also have to remember to empty the liquid compartment promptly into a bucket every time you use it, otherwise it will become stagnant and begin to smell horrible. As usual with dual-function equipment, the use and maintenance are more complicated than with mono-use machines.

There are some things such a machine will do that, with luck, you won’t need, clever though they may be. For example, some can suck out solid-fuel ash from a fireplace, gulp up flooding from burst pipes, unblock the sink (what’s wrong with a plunger?) and clear away snow and dead leaves outside the house.

Large commercial wet-and-dry vacuums seem to do the job best, but they are nothing if not heavy and they also make a fearful noise, so are best in a workshop or large building like a school. Medium ones are more compact and still give a good performance, so might be the thing for a large family in a big house where there’s lots going on. The small and mini ones are less worthwhile unless you live in a very small space or just want to use them for sucking up crumbs, though it may be quicker to mop up small spills with a dustpan or a cloth.

In a small flat, a wall-hung cordless vacuum will take up less room and do a satisfactory job. Between these are dozens and dozens of makes of vacuum cleaner. Choose one with the minimum necessary attachments and don’t keep those jumbled in a cardboard box under the stairs where they will be impossible to get at. If you are a clean tidy person, or someone who spends a lot of time at the gym or on the town, rather than messing up your home you might find a carpet sweeper is enough. This is a really simple manual implement on a long handle with revolving brushes that sweep dirt into an incorporated dustpan as you push it backwards and forwards. One of their big advantages is that they are so quiet compared with