Hijacking your thread to advocate for my lazy ideology. Disclaimer I have pretty severe ADHD so this might be extreme for most people but for me this makes life liveable.
Forget trying to make things look super tidy and neat like in an IKEA commercial. Make your living space functional, comfortable and easy to maintain. Reduce the amount of physical, mental and emotional effort required to maintain your environment. For example, for laundry:
- Don’t iron anything unless you really need/want to. (Job interview, going on a date, appearing in court, etc.)
- Anywhere you’re liable to undress, have a basket for dirty clothes. It should be open-topped (no lid!) and mobile, like a laundry basket, so when you need to do a load of laundry, you can pick up and use the whole basket - functioning both as the hamper and the basket. Bedroom and bathroom are the usual places for this! You want the act of tossing dirty clothes in the laundry to be just as easy as tossing it on the floor.
- There’s no such thing as odd socks. They’re called mix ‘n’ match socks now. Like Mashems!
- No neatly folded clothes or hangers or anything like that, except for very special things such as in point 1 - everything just gets dumped into big drawers based on category. I have little fabric boxes that fit into a kallax to keep this relatively neat looking but super easy.
- If something can’t survive going in the washing machine mixed load cycle and the tumble dryer daily load, it is not welcome in my life. (There’s a similar rule about the dishwasher!)
You get the idea. Embrace your laziness, don’t bother yourself with half a second what people might think of how you live. This is surprisingly neat and orderly and takes almost no effort to maintain. If you keep finding your basket is misplaced, buy another basket and keep it in two places. Stop fighting the current and go with your flow. Accept who you are, even if you’re a lazy bitch like me!
Late to this, but except for folding (or hanging up) clothes, this is my laundry strategy. Don’t own an iron. Travel steamer for emergencies, more often used to refresh my hair.
I used to tell my kids to stand in the laundry basket to undress, because they couldn’t get the clothes into the basket.
There’s no such thing as odd socks. They’re called mix ‘n’ match socks now. Like Mashems!
Or just get black socks and don’t worry about mixing and matching.
You can do that too, but it’s less fun! I’m just very easily amused, of course, but there’s something joyful about wearing odd socks. Especially if they’re contradictory. Like, I wonder what people think of someone wearing one bright pink sock and one yellow sock. Or one sock that says “Star Wars” on it and another sock that has dinosaurs. I have some Star Wars Han Solo socks where Han Solo looks like John Travolta. That’s not relevant to this, but every time I see those socks, they make me laugh because he looks very funny.
Several years ago, when I was still going into the office, I made a similar decision. I tossed all my old socks and bought like, 12 pairs of argyle socks in a variety of brighter colors and deliberately wore different colors every day. They’re the same brand so they all wear the same, just sometimes bright green and orange(or whatever) on each foot. I got a few questions at first, though never negative. People thought they were being helpful letting me know my socks didn’t match, but when I told them it was intentional they thought it was a great idea. Now it’s expected for me to have mismatched socks and no one notices. Of course, being WFH now, I almost never wear socks anymore. But on the occasion someone notices these days, they don’t really care.
Clean the microwave and oven. People have some filthy microwaves(mine included).
Check the air pressure in your tires. Seems like nobody does this these days.
Clean the filter in your dishwasher once every month or two, depending on how often you use it.
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lol yeah, dishwashers require a high upfront cost. But I think they are cheaper in the long run because they use less water (and maybe less electricity?) than washing dishes by hand. I did a quick search online and it seems to be the case. However, I wonder if those first links are wrong.
Not technically a chore, but a chore preventer: Close the lid before flushing the toilet.
I run an Airbnb hosting in a room on my house for like 3 years and I’m still amazed by how little people actually did it. Even after we sat a signal asking for it just above the flush button. Having feces particles all around your brushes, toothbrushes, towels, etc is an image nobody has but myself it seems.
Read a paper on this at some point, and this has become standard practise at home. Notice that visitting friends don’t do this, so I thought about looking framing the paper and/or some figures showing those plumes after flushing (can’t remember what paper it was but I guess searching pubmed for “toilet flushing” will easily give some appropriate results).
edit: OK “toilet flushing plume” did the trick and showed this marvel (see figure 2) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9732293/
