How much housework...?

I hate housework.

I always have and now that I have a husband and four children I hate it even more because it gets undone so quickly.

It takes my 3 year old and 1 year old about 15 minutes to undo tidying and vaccuming, the blokes of the house 24 hours to completely undo a clean bathroom, and all of us just one meal to undo a cleaned kitchen with washed dishes.

And after I spend a whole day getting on top of the washing my family undresses to get in to bed and creates another whole load of washing.

It's a bit depressing really.

So lately I've been thinking about how much housework is enough.

One of my friends has such a lovely clean house, but she devotes each Monday to cleaning it. I think that's amazing and admirable and I wish that my house was that clean ... but I'm just not prepared to spend 1/7 of my week making it so.

I firmly subscribe to the idea that I'm VERY unlikely to lie on my death bed wishing that I had spent more time cleaning my house but I do want my house to be nice, for friends to be able to drop in and for my family to be able to function here.
 
So how much is enough?

Well, I guess that I think you should clean your house to the point that you can enjoy your life in it, but don't clean it more than that ... go out and have fun instead.

For example, my quality of life is affected if I walk across the floor and it goes crunch, crunch, crunch. But does it need to be mopped every second day, just for the sake of it? Nope, not for me.

But maybe there are people out there that need to know that they mopped the floor in the last 24 hours, otherwise they just can't relax at home and their quality of life is affected.

So my housework message is this ... work out what YOUR bare minimum is and do that.

Then make yourself a nice cup of tea and relax on the (cleanish) couch.


How often do you clean your house?