Clean Blue Water

This morning I woke up and went to the bathroom and as I watched the clean blue water turn green, a signal was sent to my brain telling me I should make the bed before I went to the kitchen. It’s Sunday and I was not the first to rise, so (as I was reminded earlier this week) since I was last out of the bed, I should make it. “Did you make the bed?” she said as she was checking one of the checkboxes on a page of her laminated to-do list in her neatly bound folder, And I said, “yes” and she checked it off with dry erase marker. I made the bed earlier this week before I was reminded of the newly implemented rule and she said, “did Hannah make our bed?” And I said, “No, I did”, and she said “thanks honey”. (I’m not sure, but looking back at it now; she may have made an annotation next to the “bed being made” check-box as she was thanking me)

You see, our home is undergoing a “Flylady transformation” as my wife has embarked upon a new approach to daily household chores. And I, being one who wants to do his fair share of the housework, for the first time in 10 years am having a hard time keeping up (not that anyone keeps score on such things in our family, because we absolutely do not!). This is not because Amber is killing herself doing all of this new Flylady stuff. Quite the contrary, it’s her fantastic Flylady routine that she gleaned from the Flylady’s book, Sink Reflections.

Briefly the Flylady premise is that if you establish daily routines that enable you to break down tasks into no more than 15 minute jobs and rotate them through different parts of your house on a weekly basis, you can reduce the chaos associated with piles of laundry, piles of dishes, and piles of dust-bunnies (ours are so prodigious that he call them pet hair tumbleweeds) and actually give yourself more free time. And Amber reminds me, this is not about perfection, but about starting at where you are and taking baby steps. And so far, judging from the clean blue water in the toilets, the continuously empty laundry hampers, and the shiny sinks, it’s definitely working. And of course it makes sense, in fact I teach this stuff – smaller batch sizes; point-of-use kitting; de-clutter using the 5-S’s (Sort, Straighten, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain); Standard work sheets; etc. How could it not work?

For anyone reading this who doubts the benefits of this approach consider this: We have reduce our paid housekeeper from weekly to bi-weekly (saving us $150/month), we have virtually eliminated the conflict that used to arise because someone did not do a chore, and we have blue water in our toilets and very shiny sinks. Amber has more time to bead, read and lay on her float in the pool and I have more time to Blog. And as Martha would say “that’s a good thing”.