Coffee House Blog

This week my enjoyment of housekeeping has deteriorated as boredom seeps into the mundanity of the chores and I reach the point where I’m also sure that all those people who illustrate those housework-is-beautiful coffee-table books with gaily tripping 50’s housewives ought to be forced to do every single inane thing they suggest.  So I try to re-motivate myself by checking out a website -  www.flylady.net – recommended to me by a friend as down to earth and doable.  It was depressing reading.  As sugar is spun to sickly candyfloss so are about three lines of commonsense advice expanded to fill a whole website.  And its relentless cheerfulness and condescending tone are exceedingly irritating.  I am simply not interested in the ‘27-fling-boogie’ as a way to clear out debris with no excuses.  Reading this advice nobody is trying to keep on top of things whilst in the middle of doing up a house, nor are any of us so unfortunate as not to have dedicated ‘laundry rooms’ to let us ‘just do a little bit and stop’.  Anyone who dries their laundry on radiators knows that if the floor isn’t clean the fresh white sheets will fall into the dirt.  Indeed the whole tone of the website is redolent of fifties admonishment.  At least then cigarettes were recommended and Valium available to let you tune out of it all.  Now you’re expected to sort the wretched sink to perfection in an environmentally friendly kind of way without any chemical assistance, guilty in the knowledge gleaned from helpful TV advertising that the average sink has more germs in it than your loo.  And don’t forget to also hold down at least a fulltime job.

After resentfully buffing the hall’s laminate flooring to try to make it ‘glow’ as the advertising on the polish promises, I find that the cellar door has come unlatched.  Small black paw-prints track brazenly out from it.  I yell futilely at the cat now happily printing a black edging round the bath and peer down the dimly lit stairs.  Each step is thick with dust.  And there are even genuine Victorian coal bits from when it was a real coal cellar. I grab a broom and brush vigorously to try to get it all to the bottom in order to sweep it up.  A good portion of it does indeed fall to the bottom.  A somewhat larger portion though billows up and out to land on every surface of my once lovely clean home.  I investigate beyond the stairs and find at least the main room of the cellar looks decent. What was once a built in pantry though has crumbling lath and horsehair plaster threatening to descend.  Never mind.  This falls squarely into the DIY category and out of my remit. Finally the dust settles. I set the Vax to ‘wet mop’ and do as many of the stairs as can be reached from the top.  And then start to wipe, mop and dust the house all over again.

Exhausted and filthy I check out cleaning services advertising on the net.  None of them post their rates yet I know the equation is still roughly the same.  If I want to pay someone else to clean up our mess then I need to earn more than I do freelancing.  And a return to the rat race is still the only thing worse than scrubbing my own floors.