Re: Household maintenance schedules that work
Sorry to hear what you’ve gone through. I’m interested to know if looking after the house was contributing to stress a lot before and why. Is it because you or your husband have very high standards? If it is something like this then you can implement as many systems as you want but a lot of it is going to be you/your husband learning to let go of having a perfect house all the time.
At the risk of repeating a lot of the advise -
Since you are at home full time, I wouldn’t leave all the cooking until the weekend. As others have suggested perhaps cook every other day and plan your meals. I’d cook two things every two days. One would be for dinner and such that the left overs can be used for lunch (like Bella’s keema aloo suggestion), and the other dish for the second day dinner. If one day you plan to make kebabs, make a lot in one go. Use some to make burgers that day for dinner (I love home made chips, but just buy some that you can whack in the oven at night to make for a quick dinner), and freeze the rest for emergencies. You can also do the same with other dishes. For example, if making keema aloo (depends on your method), make double the amount of basic keema and once it’s bhoon’d thoroughly remove half for cooling and putting in the freezer. The other half can remain in the handi so you can add your diced potato and a bit of water water to cook them. When you want to use the frozen one, defrost it, heat it in the handi and then again add your diced potato and a bit of water for them to cook.
If you have more energy earlier in the day, do the cooking then before going for a shower and getting ready. I think you’ll feel better if you have done your major chore for the day and cleaned up the kitchen before getting ready - then you have the rest of the day to relax or perhaps do some light housework like deciding your girls outfits for the week or putting away clutter and dusting. I also think laundry can be considered light housework depending on how you go about it, so don’t leave it all for one day.
Until I left my parents, I was responsible for all the housework for a family of 8 (yes, there was delegation), so you can imagine how much laundry there’d be. To make life easier, we had multiple laundry baskets in different rooms for different purposes, rather than chucking everything in one place. There was a large laundry basket which was only for whites or light coloured cottons and everyone knew that those items went in there only. There was another for dark items, synthetics or knitwear. This way, as soon as I noted that any one basket had a full load of washing in it, I’d go and put that load in - no sorting required or ending up with huge piles of mixed laundry.
My brothers all had wash bags (those delicate item bags) for their dirty socks in their own rooms (darks only), so those could just be rounded up once a week and put in the machine directly. This meant that once they were washed and dried, they didn’t need sorting and were returned to their owners for putting away. By doing one or two loads during the week, you can save the weekend for bigger things like bedding or towels which I think you should ask your husband to help out with (i.e. removing covers and putting on new ones!). Definitely plan these on a calendar. The other thing we never did was ironing after washing. Clothes were just put away and ironed before wear. You can do a few days worth of yours/your girls clothes at a time but it doesn’t have to be when you have laundered them! Get your husband to iron his own clothes every night for the next day.
I think if one doesn’t have kids, one can easily just do a deep clean on the weekends (this is what I do). However, I think with children the house gets a lot messier quickly and it may be overwhelming if you leave it all to the weekend. So on the days you are not cooking, aim to do one bigger chore, like cleaning the bathroom (I think you can schedule this for twice a week) or the vacuuming. Vacuuming I’d suggest you ask your husband to do on the weekend but I don’t know whether he is completely opposed to doing anything in the house, or if he won’t do regular chores of his own accord but will do the odd thing if you ask him to.
I also think you should be getting a cleaner in but if you can’t get someone regularly for whatever reason, at least consider hiring someone for a couple of hours once a month for things like cleaning the windows or deep cleaning the kitchen.
