The "No-Maintenance" House
by Carolyn Ellis

Description: Tips for creating and organizing a "no maintenance" house.

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The no maintenance house? Well not exactly, but I bet I have a lot less housework than most of you! It's true most normal middle class folks will think my ideas about housekeeping are crazy but that's O.K.! It won't be the first time people have laughed at me!

It was easy for me to be neat and orderly when it was just my husband and me. It was even quite possible to keep the house up to snuff when we only had a few children, but by the time number four came along I was at the outer limit of what my poor native organizational skills could handle. By the time we added "numbers five (1994) and six (1996)" I had admittedly gotten pretty clever about minimizing housework, but as the years have gone by I have gotten even sneakier about how to reduce the burden of housework in our family!

The main cornerstone of my whole approach to housecleaning is the throw-it-out principle, often called the more-is-less approach. I am not a saver of anything, neither is my husband. I do everything I can to keep our house "lean!" Since I don't like carpets and rugs all our floors are bare. (This alone is a huge time saver in terms of all the labor that goes into maintaining and protecting rugs!) In fact, our house is so bare that more than once we have had people ask us if we had just moved into our home! Surprisingly enough even our children have had to deal with the reality of our home's rather radical simplicity. You'd be amazed at how many "lectures" our kids have had from other kids about how impoverished our home is because we use sleeping bags on the floor instead of beds and because we have so few conventional toys! The joke is that these very same kids are totally wowwed by what our children come up with for games and activities and keep coming back to play!

So what are the nitty gritty details of our "no maintenance" home? Here are a few of my strategies:

All our woodwork is painted a shade of brown, instead of the usual white to hide dirt.

• Our hallway and dining room both have chair rails with off-white above the brown rail and a much darker color below.
• Many of our interior light switches not only have a clear plastic protector around them to shield the wall from dirt but I have added a piece of wide vinyl border (wallpaper) around many of these switches to protect an even larger wall area from dirt.
• In the living room every horizontal surface is covered with what I consider an attractive piece of fabric in order to avoid the need to dust.
• Since blinds are nothing but dust collectors I eliminated them years ago.
• Each of our six children has a 30-gallon plastic container to keep their junk in. This container is kept either in the attic or in our shed! (Sooner or later these containers will get dealt with as I help the kids see that they don't really need all that stuff!) Only what the children can't live without is kept in their rooms.
• If we happen to have a child under 18 months you will find some bona fide toys in our house, but in general, our only inside toys are Legos and a chess set. (Paints, crayons, pencils...I do not call toys).

With the exception of my husband who needs good clothes for work, the rest of us have only one set of good clothes for fall/winter and one for spring/summer.

All of the above tips help me enormously in keeping our house unstuffed and looking sharp with a minimum amount of work, but my real trade secret is that I get all the children involved in helping me keep up with dirt and litter! Of course a lot of families have their kids do chores, but my ace in the hole is that I use housework as my mainstay when it comes to punishments!

Since we homeschool 5 of our 6 children, in the course of any day have to say I have more than enough occasions to punish one or another of the children! If someone grabs a book from another child, if someone gets hit or shoved, if someone leaves a mess on the kitchen counter, if someone is disrespectful...the offender gets a work assignment. The assignments range all over the board from "pick up 30 things off the floor" to "organize the linen closet" to "do 15 minutes of work in the kitchen" to whatever it is that I want done! Considering that I probably hand out 7-10 assignments a day you can see that I get quite a fair amount of work done by the children via this kind of approach to punishments!

But there's more! Typically 3-5 times a week one or more of the children will want me to take them some place, perhaps to the store to buy something for a project or craft that someone is working on, perhaps to go to the library even though it is getting close to dinner. Guess what, I get work done for any of these. If the timing is particularly inconvenient but still possible I may end up with as much as 45 minutes of dedicated work from one of the three older kids.

If a child is broke but badly wants something that I don't think Fred and I need to supply I once again fall back on housework as the way for the kids to earn the money they need. The going rate at our house for unskilled labor is $2/hr. In the course of a month it is not uncommon to end up with 2-3 hours of more housecleaning! If a child wants a special privilege, for example, having a friend over to spend the night on the spur of the moment or wants desperately to watch a particular video tonight, again I invoke my housework scheme and "negotiate" with the particular child for a specific amount of work, often more than an hour's worth!

When you consider how much work is done by the children as part of daily chores--their bedrooms the bathrooms, dividing up and putting away most of the laundry, dong the dinner dishes...and then add daily work assignments that are given out as punishments you see that I get a surprisingly ample amount of work done by the children rather than by me. And then there are those "windfalls" when I get more work done because of a "deal" that one of the kids and I cut over going some place or getting some privilege! All in all, with the way I run our house on a "less-is-more" diet, you would think our house would always look terrific! Believe me it doesn't! Since 5 of our children plus our 4 big dogs are home all day I am always surrounded by dirt and chaos. I tell the children that there are 6 of them messing up all day while there is only one of me to clean up, not my mess, but theirs! Of course they have to help! If the work is done cheerfully and well I often reduce the work assignment or add a small reward.

My mother, God rest her soul, once told me years and years ago when I was just a child that if I put everything back that I took out, there would never be any messes to clean up! As a kid I was entranced by the disarming simplicity of mother's strategy but I'm afraid neither the children nor I have ever been able to master my mother's wise words! Keeping a lean, simple house and enlisting the kids' help all day long via punishments and "deals" is about the best I have been able to come up with!

Carolyn Ellis is a homeschooling mom and author of the 60 page self-published booklet "Beyond Homeschooling," $7 ppd. To order make checks payable to Carolyn Ellis, 1109 Hilltop Drive, Irving TX, 75060.

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