My Secret to Mundane Household Chores


Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll talk about how I deal with mundane household chores. 
I'm someone who enjoys a good project, but I’m not great at routine maintenance tasks.  Unfortunately, life is FULL of mundane maintenance tasks that need to be done, but aren’t very exciting. 
When I started staying at home with my kids, I gave up all of my interesting projects at work and was faced with the grinding monotony of a mountain of household chores.  Laundry that needed to be done, folded, and put away on a daily basis in a never-ending cycle was honestly enough to make me want to run screaming.  I once worked on a temporarily basis at a large government Library.  This is a job I thought I would love — after all, I love libraries. However, I would no sooner get back from shelving a cart of heavy Dewey decimal ordered books, when there would be no fewer than FIVE more carts to shelve — they seems to multiply exponentially somehow. It was like the 9th ring of hell for me where the job never ended. 
I needed to figure out a way to trick my brain into doing these brain numbing tasks without going nuts. The key for me was transforming repetitive maintenance tasks into a project that I did only once weekly.  That i could check off my list and not see again until the following week. Let’s take laundry. Most of my friends do a little every day or every couple of days. As as result, there is always a load needing to be dried, folded, or put away.  That for me is ring of hell territory.  So, in my house, laundry day is on Thursday. I do 4-6 loads of laundry one after another — with timers set so I can remember to change the loads.  Then there is no laundry again until the following Thursday, so I can check it off my list for the week.   If the kids have something that needs to be washed off cycle, they can wash it themselves!  Laundry is washed on Thursdays and folded and put away on Fridays. Plus Friday’s chore is much shorter now that I make my teenaged kids fold and put away their own clothes. 
This task structuring means that I can mark these chores off my list weekly.  I no longer feel like I have a little to do every day with no end in sight. Like the drip, drip, drip of torture. It doesn’t mean I have less to do, it just helps me have a better attitude about it. Here is a list of other chores that I have weekly projectized:
  • Bills - I gather all my paperwork for the week in a folder and handle it all on Fridays
  • Groceries - I order for the week on Fridays and have delivered on Mondays. I’ll do a separate video why I’d prefer to never step foot in a grocery store.  
  • Clean bathrooms - Tuesdays
  • Vacuum - upstairs on Wednesdays, downstairs on Thursdays
  • 15m of Organization - this is going through a drawer, a cabinet or (in most cases) a pile that has built up.  Should be no longer than 15 minutes or I get overwhelmed and will skip it. This happens every Saturday.
  • Outdoor chores - this is also a Saturday or Sunday activity.  I can always find something to do outside: rake leaves, gather twigs and branches, trim bushes, weed my garden, or cover it for the winter.  I try to limit it to 30 minutes unless it’s a finite big project like raking leaves.
Okay — maybe this weekly system wouldn’t help you, but it helps me stay on top of my boring chores without feeling like there is always something more to be done.
Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!

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