Now that houses are no longer illuminated by the sooty flames of town gas, spring cleaning is best performed in fall. The windows are closed against dust, and the thundering family herd is back in school.
For no particular reason, I’ve been looking forward to fall cleaning this year. It’s pleasant to go back to traditional Seattle hibernation. I’ve been able to skate along on previous maintenance efforts for several years, just keeping up with superficial vacuuming and dusting. This season seems to be the time to tighten up my game.
I lose my enthusiasm, usually when I’ve been crouching over a laptop and my cardio is impaired. Saturday it rained, the perfect excuse to ignore yard work in favor of tuning the interior.
The light exercise and upper body workout of housekeeping seems to be the ideal way to uncoil after too long a time at the keyboard.
The trick to keeping the house in order, as opposed to getting it in order, has always been to set it up so it’s easy to clean. With that done, routine maintenance is trivial. A room silts up, though, with accretions like those left at the high tide line on a beach.
How we use the house evolves over the course of the year, so it’s no wonder that arrangements become obsolete. New things displace existing inventory. What is redundant is not always obvious.
The first lesson I learned when I started keeping house on my own was that
attending to simple maintenance was the quickest way to raise my standard of living. Last Saturday I drove quietly through the interior like Patton on his way through Germany, taking out the dead, routing furniture to the best room for winter comfort, and most fun of all, high grading digital gear for best performance.
Several rooms are now as spare as eighteenth-century interiors. They are just as easy to maintain, and nearly as green as that period before fossil fuel locked the developed world into dormant furniture and artificial light.
Years of restoration projects on the house taught me that
meticulously tidying a work site after the crew went home fostered cheerful production the next day. The same is true for the family.
There seems to be no boundary between housekeeping and any other kind of composition.
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More after the jump.