The Nifty Foodie's Life

I’m sure many people can relate to me when I say that cleaning the house is very difficult to upkeep and just plain tedious. I mean, I’ll spend a good half day of my weekend to make sure the house is spotless, only to find myself doing the same thing all over again the next weekend! I want my weekends back!

After reading this article about housekeeping, it seems that people CAN keep their homes clean when they work on it a little everyday, consciously preventing the mess from happening all over again. This isn’t a deep cleaning, but more of a way to keep things organized in your home and prevent clutter. Deep cleaning still would need to happen, but it won’t take up 1/2 of my day!

So, here is my vow to my home until the end of the year. I will spend 15 minutes everyday cleaning you, other than doing the daily things like dishes and laundry. I will also share with you every week what I did!

15 minutes is nothing. It’s a quarter of an hour, in a day when I come home from work and have 7 hours to spend on doing other things. Now that I type that..7 hours….wow, I feel lazy! Where does that time go?

So, it’s time to put on the iPod, jam to 4-5 songs and spend that time CLEANING! It’ll be over before you know it!

15 minutes cleaning ideas

• Steam clean the kitchen floor with the Shark Mop.   I can’t tell you how much my kitchen floor gets grimy from my messing cooking and baking. It gets on my dang nerves!
• Throw away junk mail and organize bills.   I usually do this once a month and it proves to be a pretty daunting task. Once a week would be MUCH easier and would allow me to have our kitchen island back!
• Clean out the pantry and organize food to giveaway to a food bank.   This is especially great since the holidays are coming up, and I know we won’t be needing all of that Chef Boyardee since no hurricanes hit this year! Whew!
• Clean the bathroom countertop.   Blech…all that make-up residue and hair around the sink? Clean it up with a Clorox wipe and put everything back in their drawers!
• Weed the garden.   If I did this once/week, I know would only take me fifteen minutes. Pesky weeds!
• Clean the bedroom floor.  I can’t tell you how much stuff I just throw on the side of my bed. Magazines, dirty socks, coupons…ugh!
• Switch out the bed sheets!   I think I’m supposed to do this once/week or something like that. I don’t want to imagine the dust mite colony that we sleep in. I only change the sheets every 2-3 weeks!

Does anyone want to take this cleaning vow with me? C’mon, you know you hate it when your weekend is taken up by Clorox and the broom!

I didn’t think it would be this difficult to get back into the swing of things. Before we got married, I’d work-out 4 days a week at the local Y, go home, get/make dinner, watch TV and call it a night. Now that we’re married and all, it feels different. It shouldn’t, but it does.

I feel obligated to clean the house more, like my mom used to do. A happy house is a clean house, I guess you can say. The problem is, it’s truly overwhelming and sometimes, I don’t know where to start exactly.

I feel obligated to cook every night. I used to not care, but now that DH and I are on a diet, I feel like I’m primarily responsible for the menu planning and cooking. That’s pretty overwhelming as well, because I’m always trying to find the best bang for the buck to meet our food budget, which I set at $250 a month. It’s feasible, but will take some work.

Weirdly enough, I don’t feel obligated to work-out anymore. I fit in my beautiful dress, so why lose the weight? Why put the energy forth? I know it’s worth it, but cooking and cleaning feel like my first priority when my HEALTH should be my first priority.

Somehow it seems like DH is in his own routine, back to the norm. He’s still doing yardwork, helping me clean after cooking and fixing random things around the house. How does he do it?

It’s so weird getting back into the swing of things. If you’re married, how did you get a routine going that didn’t feel so awkward?