Anyone can do it. Cleaning and tidying your house is the simplest, least expensive way to make your home gleam.  Anyone can do it.  (Why doesn’t HGTV have more shows about house keeping?)  It’s not the hardwood floors, expensive furnishings, or designer fabrics to make your home feel beautiful.  Go ahead, girl, dream about that big house with the chef’s kitchen.  If your current kitchen looks like Katrina, what on earth makes you think your chef’s kitchen won’t be a bigger version of the same catastrophe? More square footage and grand entryways won’t make it home-like.  It’s the housekeeper, people. I say, let’s stop fantasizing about what we want all the time, and start making life pleasant with what we have.  You would be surprised at how quickly your “need” for that additional square footage would diminish were you to begin to clean and care for the space you have. Whenever I start to feel down in the dumps about all the things I “don’t have,” the quickest cure is to hop up and start appreciating what I do have by caring for it.  Scrub down the bathroom, re-arrange some furniture, hang those pictures in the hall, put on some music and a kettle for tea, and you have made a home. 

See, keeping house involves a list of repeated activities that are completed predictably over, and over, and over.  You always hear people complain about the repeated picking up of toys, or endless mounds of laundry. But I think that’s the beauty of it. The cumulative years of those daily activities: cooking dinner, folding laundry, tidying up all matter.  In a frantic, unpredictable world, these monotonous chores and exercises  are comfort and stability.  Your family will remember these cyclic, domestic activities and whether or not you were cheerful or disgruntled about them.  You may as well be cheerful, because they are not going away.  As the keeper of my house, I hold the Power of the Mundane in my hands.  I have the power to shape my family’s sense of “this is how life is.”