Welcome to Lesson 1 of the Free Homemaking Course!
Before we start learning how to clean, do laundry, plan meals, organize, budget, or take care of all the other jobs around the house, we need to start with something much simpler: understanding the home you’re taking care of.
Every home is different. A home with several children has different needs than a home with one or two adults. Pets, work schedules, the size of your home, your budget, and even the season you’re in can change what needs your attention.
That’s why there isn’t one perfect homemaking schedule that works for everyone.
Learning to manage a home starts with understanding what your particular home needs from you.
What Does It Actually Take to Run a Home?
When we hear the word homemaking, it’s easy to immediately think about cleaning. Cleaning is certainly part of homemaking, but it’s only one piece of it.
Running a home can include preparing meals, buying groceries, doing laundry, paying bills, keeping household supplies stocked, cleaning, organizing, scheduling appointments, maintaining the home, caring for belongings, and keeping track of all the little things that need to happen along the way.
That’s a lot.
And if nobody ever taught you how to manage all of those things, it’s easy to feel like you’re constantly reacting to whatever needs your attention the most.
The laundry pile gets huge, so you spend the day doing laundry. Then you realize there’s nothing planned for dinner. While you’re figuring that out, you notice the bathroom needs cleaning. Then somebody needs something for tomorrow that you forgot to buy.
It can feel like you’re working all day without ever actually getting ahead.
Good homemaking isn’t about doing more and more. It’s about learning what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, and how to manage it without everything becoming an overwhelming task that need to happen immediately.
That’s what we’re going to learn throughout this course.
Every Home Has Different Needs
One of the easiest mistakes to make when learning homemaking is copying someone else’s routine exactly.
You see that someone cleans bathrooms every Monday, does laundry twice a week, grocery shops every Friday, and deep cleans the refrigerator on the first of every month.
It looks organized, so you try to do the same thing.
But it may not work at all in your house.
A household with six people may need laundry running nearly every day. Someone with several pets may need to vacuum much more frequently. A person living alone may only need to grocery shop every couple of weeks.
Your goal isn’t to figure out what you are supposed to be doing.
Your goal is to figure out what your home actually needs.
Start Thinking in Daily, Weekly, and Occasional Tasks
Most of the work involved in running a home can be divided into three basic groups: things that need frequent attention, things that need regular attention, and things that only need to be handled occasionally.
Daily or Frequent Tasks
These are the little things that keep your household functioning from one day to the next.
Your list might include dishes, meals, wiping kitchen counters, picking things up, taking care of pets, checking the laundry, or taking out the trash.
Not every task literally needs to happen every single day. The point is that these are jobs you need to stay on top of fairly regularly.
Weekly or Regular Tasks
These jobs need attention routinely, but they generally don’t need to happen every day.
Depending on your household, this could include cleaning bathrooms, vacuuming, mopping, changing bedding, meal planning, grocery shopping, or catching up on certain laundry.
We’ll eventually learn how to turn these responsibilities into a routine. For now, you don’t need to make a schedule.
Occasional Tasks
Then there are the jobs that don’t need to happen very often but still need to happen eventually.
Think about cleaning the oven, washing windows, changing filters, cleaning underneath furniture, going through closets, organizing the pantry, checking smoke detectors, or completing seasonal home maintenance.
These jobs are easy to forget precisely because they aren’t part of everyday life.
You don’t need to remember all of them right now. As we work through the course, we’ll learn how to keep track of them without carrying an enormous mental list around in your head.
Take a Walk Through Your Home
Now I want you to do something that might feel a little strange: Walk through your house without cleaning anything.
We’re not fixing the house yet. We’re learning to see it. As you enter each room, think about what happens there and what needs to happen for that room to function well.
Take your kitchen, for example. Obviously, it needs to be cleaned. But look a little deeper.
Do dishes pile up faster than you can keep up with them? Does food regularly expire in the refrigerator? Are your counters constantly covered with things that don’t belong there? Do you run out of basic ingredients? Is figuring out dinner stressful every night?
Now look at your laundry area.
Maybe washing clothes isn’t actually your problem. Perhaps you’re great about washing and drying everything, but clean laundry lives in baskets for days afterward.
That’s important to notice because “I can’t keep up with laundry” isn’t specific enough to solve. “I don’t have a good system for getting clean clothes folded and put away” is.
Do the same thing throughout your home.
Find What’s Making Your Home Harder to Manage
As you walk around, pay attention to the problems that happen over and over again.
Maybe everyone walks through the door and drops shoes, coats, backpacks, and mail in the same place. Maybe you constantly run out of toilet paper or laundry detergent. Maybe you buy groceries but still don’t know what to make for dinner. Maybe one particular room becomes messy again almost immediately after you clean it.
These repeating problems are valuable information.
Sometimes the solution isn’t clean more or try harder. The problem may be that your home needs a better system.
Throughout this course, we’re going to learn those systems along with the actual homemaking skills.
Lesson 1 Assignment: Get to Know Your Home
You don’t need to clean your entire house after this lesson. In fact, I don’t want you to. Just do what you normally would.
Grab a notebook or piece of paper and walk through your home. When you’re finished, write down three things that repeatedly make your home difficult to manage.
Be specific.
Instead of:
My kitchen is always messy.
Try:
Everyone leaves papers and belongings on the kitchen counter, so I have to clear it before I can cook.
Instead of:
I’m always behind on laundry.
Try:
I wash and dry the clothes, but clean laundry stays in baskets because I don’t get it put away.
Instead of:
I’m bad at meal planning.
Try:
I don’t decide what we’re having for dinner until it’s almost time to eat.
Don’t worry about solving these problems yet.
For today, your job is simply to notice them and write them down.
Keep your three answers. We’ll be learning skills throughout this course that can help you solve them.
If you want to write more, that’s okay too, but please do not get overwhelmed, that is not what this is about. This is about noticing WHY.
You’re Not Trying to Create a Perfect Home
There is no single correct way to manage a home.
The goal of homemaking isn’t to make your house look untouched or to spend your entire life maintaining it. Your home is where people eat, sleep, play, work, make messes, get sick, celebrate, and live their lives.
We’re learning how to take care of all of that without allowing the work of running a home to completely take over your life.
You completed the first step today simply by learning to look at your home differently.
In the next lesson, we’re going to get much more hands-on.
Lesson 2 of the Free Homemaking Course is coming soon. In the meantime, these guides can help you start putting what you’ve learned into practice:
How to Manage Laundry: 4 Rules to Success
Homemaking 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Cleaning Your Home Without Feeling Overwhelmed
Easy Breakfast Casserole (Make-Ahead Favorite)
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