Sunday, December 2, 2012

Adventures in Homemaking

I admit it, I'm quite lazy when it comes to certain categories of homemaking - I'm a good cook, keep up on the outdoor chores, and have become skilled in saving money by purchasing secondhand as often as possible. 

However, I'm not the best at housecleaning and home maintenance. I guess it's in part because I grew up in a family of ten and so there were loads of chores to do while growing up. I suppose it didn't kill me, but it made me rather lazy about housework around my own home. Either that, or I inherited my dad's tendency toward laziness and not my mom's high-octane approach to homemaking.

Nevertheless, sometimes even I manage to get things done around the house. Case in point was this past week, during which Monday saw the visit from the heating and cooling guy for our furnace's annual maintenance. After he was done servicing our furnace, on a whim I asked if he did hot water heater repairs too. Turns out he can do repairs that don't require plumbing, so he was able to put in a part that had broken off inside the hot water heater. Now we can take showers with hot water that lasts longer than five minutes - yippee!

Then Tuesday I really got down to business: I'd just gotten a home carpet cleaner, seen here, so now it was time to do the minor assembly needed before using the carpet cleaner for the first time and then learning how to use the thing. I approached both tasks with a bit of trepidation, for some of the online reviews referred to leakage, loss of suction and other carpet cleaner calamities. But in actuality, assmeblage and usage were both accomplished easily. 

Not to say that the task was a breeze overall. The carpet in our house is light beige and hadn't been cleaned adequately in too long a time, I admit (remember, I said I was lazy). So this meant I had to move as much as I could out of each room and vacuum very thoroughly as well. And the overall level of grunginess meant that it took quite some time to get the carpet looking halfway decent again.

I paced myself by doing one downstairs room a day. The carpet cleaner worked well - in fact, it seemed to work better than the commercial machine I rented one time. One drawback, though, is that since it's a smaller unit than a commercial carpet machine, I had to stop frequently to empty out the dirty water tank and refill the cleaning solution tank (both were done at the same time).

But the upside is that I have the convenience of doing the carpet cleaning when I feel like it, and as often as I feel like it. Who knows, now that I have my own carpet cleaning machine, I may even feel like cleaning the carpet more often!

2 comments:

  1. You are not the only lazy homemaker out there! Count me in! My mother in law once complained about the dirty windows in my living room, so I got up and closed the blinds. Ha! Like the common saying says, "Clean enough to be healthy, dirty enough to be happy."

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  2. I liked your solution to your MIL's critique! I hope she didn't try that line on you again after that. I'd never heard of that saying, but it's a good one!

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