joyful2beeblogs

Do you ever wonder if you really hate housework? True, most of us have no doubts about our feelings toward that necessary evil that distracts us from the pleasures of life.

If there is any ambivalence about those feelings, I have several clues that might help you figure this out. If you can answer yes to any of these you probably hate housework or are too busy to do it. (At the bottom of this post you can see a reasonable way to avoid it.)

1. Are there dust bunnies breeding under your bed or couch?
2. Do you have dark, dingy cobwebs hanging from the corners of your ceilings?
3. When you sit on your couch does a cloud of dust rise into the air?
4. Do you dread when other people come to see you because of all the silly lies that you have to prevaricate to explain the mess your house is in?
5. Do you glue the shower curtain to the wall so that no nosy visitors can check your housekeeping skills or the lack there of?
6. Are your plants waving at you with pitiful, withering fronds because you haven’t dusted or watered them lately?
7. Have you forgotten what color your carpet really is because there are so many pieces of lint, dust, pet hair and bits, of something you no longer know the identity of, on your carpet?
8. Have you had trouble finding your kids or pets after they came home, because they wandered into a dirty clothes “drift?”
9. Do you find pet hairs so thick on everything that you wonder if they could be spun like thread and crocheted into an afghan?

Well let me give you some helpful hints on getting the work done.

1. Provide yourself with incentive to clean the house. Wait until you have a project you hate worse than housework. Suddenly the housework becomes an excuse not to get the project done. One day years ago I was focusing on some work related classwork. Suddenly I remembered I had bought a new extendable duster thingy with disposable fluffy attachment that I hadn’t tried yet. So I got out my extender fluffy thingy and proceeded to dust the walls and the furniture. House dusted, classwork done but under slightly increased stress.

2. Housework is more fun when done a little at a time and when it is done to music blaring so you are distracted from what you are actually doing. I recommend hard rock or belly dancing music because of the variable rates and beats of the music plus they just stimulate you to want to dance, which is fun! If you dance to the music while you are performing your tasks, you may expect to burn some calories too!
3. If you have small children you can bribe them with hidden coins. Make a game out of it. Hide the coins where the kids can only find them if they dust or put things away. Of course for conditioning their little minds in a way least likely to be unlearned use “partial re-enforcement.” This means instead of always using coins for rewards, intermittently offer wild praises, a trip to the park, some ice cream or some other treat so as not to make them greedy entrepreneurs for money at a very early age. You could go broke!
4. One last motivation to get your housework done mostly applies to mothers of grown children, who have married and had children already. As we get older we may appear to be “losing it” if we let our homes get too messy. So when my kids are coming over I start a frenzied clean up, starting two days from their ETA. What I don’t get done, I just attribute to the lived in look of my home.
5. I made the neatest discovery. If you leave your ceiling fan on high, when you have a pet hair strewn floor, the fan makes a little tornado that gathers up the hairs. You will find little pet hair tumbleweeds rolling around under the fan! (Of course there will be other dust that gets blown under the couch but no one will see those!)Cat hair tumbleweed
6. After developing back problems, foot problems, arthritis starting in my hands, knees and neck, I decided to hire a cleaning lady who comes in and does the heavy work once a month. I live in a condo with one cat, meet my friends for lunch or a movie, and rarely have company. So if the home is not perfect, I am not really mortified.

And if you ever feel like you have to get the housework done but really just don’t want to do it and have no other alternatives. I have found that blogging is an excellent way to postpone housework. You have to figure out what you want to write; write and rewrite it; edit it; search for just the right photograph for it; and preview the whole thing several times. This could take hours!

Then once the blog post is published, you of course want to check and see when someone has read, commented or followed your post or blog. Then you go through and write replies to respond to their comments. This could take all afternoon. And of course you need to read posts by some of the bloggers who have been reading your posts, as well as new ones too. And there goes one more day you didn’t get the house work done!

Do you have any methods to add to these? Feel free to share.