How to Keep Your Household Running

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I have been keeping house for over 35 years now, and believe me I’ve tried everything to make running a household easy. Truly, the only thing that I have found to make things easier has been that old rule of, “divide and conquer!” It takes the family working together to make running your household easy.

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Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Step1

The first step to divide and conquer is to list all of the household chores. List everything you can think of, including cooking dinner, setting the table, cleaning up after dinner, cleaning (dusting, vacuuming), grocery shopping, laundry, ironing, picking up and dropping off the kids, feeding and walking the dog, taking care of the lawn and taking out the garbage.

Step2

The next step is to determine just who in the household will handle each of these chores. Make sure that responsibilities are shared equally among all the members of the household.

Step3

The next step is to sit down and explain to each person just what their responsibilities will be. Also, explain any incentives that you may feel are appropriate for the children of the family, such as allowances. When it comes to the children, you should probably also set a time frame in which their responsibilities need to be completed.

Step4

After a couple of weeks, you might want to sit down as a family and review how things have been going. Perhaps some chores can be switched or shared. Communication is very important if divide and conquer is going to work!

Tips & Warnings

My husband and I have always shared our housekeeping chores. Quite simply that was how we made things work. My husband passed away two years ago. I still live in our home and I miss him dearly. My new motto for keeping house is to take everything in steps. You see, now all of those chores are mine and I pride myself in being able to still take care of our home the way we always did. So now, I just take everything in steps and eventually it all gets done. If you find yourself alone after the children have grown, just take everything in steps, and keep smiling.