Nest: Day 90
August 30, 2011 
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Day 90
Housecleaning for 90 minutes a day? Or more? Forget it.
Change the name to "Half-Assed Housekeeping" and I might read it.
If you happened to glance at my SOS Day 87 or Create Day 87 posts, you’ll note my utter fascination with a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics study detailing how Americans spend their time. I was, of course, shocked at our countless hours of television viewing; but I’m even more surprised by how industrious we all are at home. Too industrious. We must be doing something wrong.
Women average .92 hours a day cleaning the house, and men average .60 (yeah, right…do you know men who clean a half hour a day?).
Doing housekeeping chores for nearly an hour seemed awfully much to me. But then, it just reinforced what I suspected: your house is either a lot cleaner than mine because you’re always scrubbing or it’s a lot dirtier than mine since you’re always having to scrub.
However, when I looked closer, I found this number misleading. You see, since this survey includes both the very young (15 years old) up to the elderly, this average includes teens who don’t help around the house, elderly folks who no longer clean, and working people who hire others to do their cleaning.
A more useful statistic is how many hours per day people who actually engage in house cleaning put in on this task. This ensures you don’t skew your number by averaging in all the zero minutes per day of people who don’t do housework.
Then we find: Women put in 1.79 hours a day in housework (that’s nearly 2 hours!) and men put in an hour and a half (ditto my bitchy comment from above). Note that this doesn’t include meal prep and cleanup or yard work.
I know I’ve been workin’ your buns off this month cleaning and rearranging and getting rid of stuff. The reason for this is even clearer after examining these statistics: I don’t want you spending so much time every day trying to keep up your house (unless, that is, you want to). We’ve invested this time not to make you a slave to your house, but to let you better enjoy it, to let you cut back on the amount of time you spend working on it, and to allow you to put in hours on your creativity instead of on cleaning your clutter.
Our 90 days of nesting together is coming to an end, but there will be plenty of posts upcoming: guidance and projects and reviews. Tomorrow’s Day 91 will tell you where you might want to go from here. For more from the American Time Study:
Nest Month 3
What to do so far:
In case you missed a day, the reminders below are clickable.
Make your house your sanctuary.
Don’t let The Angel bedevil you.
Evaluate your entry.
Use the entry clearing checklist.
Try feng shui entry cures.
Once clean, don’t reclutter.
Decorate your front porch and entryway.
Try the 7 ways to make your home a sanctuary.
Purge your kitchen cabinets.
Remove everything but essentials from counters.
Pimp your pantry!
Clean the under-sink cabinet.
On the Ides, I’d rather…
Clean your refrig.
Clean your freezer.
Keep a freezer/pantry food inventory.
Clean your appliances.
Try non-toxic cleaning.
Clean your kitchen ceiling, doors, light switches.
Wipe down your kitchen cabinets.
Organize your recipes.
Wash the kitchen baseboards and floor.
Finish up: sink, counters, final polish.
Clean and clear bedroom surfaces.
Complete seven bedroom cleaning steps.
Clean baseboards and bedroom floor.
Remake your bed, reevaluate your bedroom.
Put in extra time now so you can cut back on housework later.
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