Household SLOB to domestic GOD
How Toby Young dusted, mopped and swept his way from...
I HAVE to confess, when I agreed to do the housework for a week I thought it would be a doddle. My wife Caroline is a stayat-home mum, but it’s not like I never lift a finger. With four kids aged 14 and under, I have to muck in and do my share. I do the bins. I quite often load the dishwasher. Sometimes, I even empty it.
My wife has a different take on things. Her view is that when I’m not working I should be spending all my time helping her with the housework, so whatever I do it’s never enough. My counter is that without the money I earn, we wouldn’t be able to employ a cleaner for two mornings a week – and that’s my main contribution to the housework. This argument does not go down well.
In spite of my inexperience, I was convinced I didn’t need any ‘tips’ from housework expert Barty Phillips, whose new book explains how to dust, clean and polish without breaking a sweat. She had sportingly agreed to steer me through my week of chores and see if she could transform me into a domestic god. But did I really need her professional guidance? It’s all bleedin’ obvious, right?
You can probably guess what happened next… MONDAY I WORK from home most of the week so taking on the duties of a househusband was relatively easy. Caroline had helpfully supplied me with a list of jobs, starting with the washing. I know what you’re thinking: the silly muppet put the white stuff in with the coloured stuff and dyed his wife’s underwear blue.
But no! I carefully separated the clothes into two batches. I even followed Barty’s advice and put a dry towel in the tumble-dryer to absorb moisture, thereby reducing the drying time. When Caroline returned to the house at lunchtime, I presented her with two baskets full of dry clothes and was expecting massive brownie points. ‘The job’s not finished,’ she said. ‘Eh?’ She patiently explained that I now had to separate the clothes into six different piles according to which member of the household they belonged to, iron and fold everything, and then place each batch in the right chest of drawers. ‘That doesn’t happen by magic, you know,’ she said – a phrase I would come to hear often in the next few days. HOURS SPENT WASHING Four DIFFICULTY LEVEL 7/10 BARTY’S TIP I SHOULDN’T HAVE IGNORED A cold rinse cycle will prevent creases in non-natural fibres. TUESDAY TODAY’S task was clearing out the cupboard under the stairs. Yesterday had proved so boring that I downloaded the audiobook of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life and listened to it while I got on with the job. Turns out the famous psychologist and Barty have a lot in common. For one thing, Peterson is a big fan of housework. Rule 4 of his book includes the line: ‘Do the damn dishes.’ He also echoes Barty’s advice about not getting demoralised by the sheer scale of the task confronting you.
‘Ask yourself: is there one thing that exists in disarray in your life or your situation that you could, and would, set straight?’ he writes. ‘Could you, and would you, fix that one thing that announces itself humbly in need of repair? Could you do it now?’
Barty’s version of this is: ‘Don’t be a martyr – take one drawer at a time.’
The stair cupboard turned out to be full of the children’s discarded trinkets. Taking all this tat to the Acton Recycling Centre was surprisingly cathartic. HOURS SPENT DECLUTTERING Three DIFFICULTY LEVEL 3/10 BARTY’S TIP I SHOULDN’T HAVE IGNORED Never throw away your children’s toys without asking.
WEDNESDAY
THE cleaner comes today, so I headed outside to clean the wooden garden chairs – a daunting prospect. Rule 1, as far as Barty is concerned, is ‘clean little but often’, thereby not letting anything get too dirty. It’s safe to say I had ignored that when it came to the patio furniture. The chairs were so encrusted with lichen that they were on the point of being reclaimed by nature. I tried Barty’s trick of scrubbing them with a witches’ brew of baking soda, hot water and vinegar, but no dice. I had to bring out the biggest gun in my arsenal: the pressure washer. I had forgotten how much fun it is attacking things with this contraption and ended up cleaning the outside of the conservatory as well. A day well spent, although Caroline did ask
AFTER FINISHING THE LAUNDRY I WAS EXPECTING MASSIVE BROWNIE POINTS – UNTIL CAROLINE SAID I’D ONLY DONE HALF THE JOB... I HOSED DOWN THE GARDEN CHAIRS WITH A JET WASHER AND RUINED MY JERMYN STREET SHIRT
why I hadn’t dismantled the bunk beds in my oldest son’s room, changed the light bulbs in the sitting room, or washed out the food recycling bin. HOURS SPENT LARKING ABOUT IN THE GARDEN Five DIFFICULTY LEVEL 5/10 BARTY’S TIP I SHOULDN’T HAVE IGNORED Wear overalls. My Jermyn Street shirt got covered in filthy water.
THURSDAY
TODAY was clean-the-kitchen day. To be fair to Caroline, it wasn’t too bad. The tiles above the stove needed a scrub, but the work surfaces were all pretty clean.
The only thing that required urgent attention was the oven. Barty’s tip is to fill a third of an oven tray with water and the juice and rinds of two lemons and bake at 250C for half an hour. It worked! I was able to wipe the grease and grime off with kitchen paper after that, although the chips that had turned black and fused with the oven floor proved more resistant. Caroline shrieked when she found me on my knees in front of the oven with a hammer and chisel. ‘I think I better take over,’ she said. HOURS SPENT CLEANING Two DIFFICULTY LEVEL 6/10 BARTY’S TIP I SHOULDN’T HAVE IGNORED Sprinkle baking soda on a filthy chopping board and wipe with half a lemon.
FRIDAY
BARTY advises using large doormats because they’re a good way of trapping dirt before it gets traipsed into the house. Caroline is way ahead of her here, except that she’s placed a small Ikea rug by the front door instead. To make sure I did it properly, Caroline had borrowed an industrial carpet cleaner from her mother. To complicate things, my mother-in-law had forgotten to include the instructions, so working out how to use it was a bit of an IQ test. Luckily, Caroline was on hand to help.
You’re supposed to fill a plastic container that sits inside the vacuum with an expensive cleaning product – manufactured by the same company, natch – but I had some of Barty’s witches’ brew left so I used that.
It proved remarkably effective. I can’t say that the rug looked ‘as new’ when I’d finished, but at least you could see the pattern again. HOURS SPENT VACUUMING 1½ DIFFICULTY LEVEL 8/10 BARTY’S TIP I SHOULDN’T HAVE IGNORED With stubborn stains, sprinkle bicarbonate of soda on them, leave for 15 minutes, then vacuum.
SATURDAY
IT WAS the weekend so I thought I’d follow Barty’s advice and rope in the kids. Their view is that mum does most of the work around the house while dad sits in his garden office drinking tea and playing on his computer (not a million miles from the truth), so they were big supporters of this ‘experiment’. Caroline asked me to make fish pie for lunch, so I press-ganged Charlie, nine, into peeling the potatoes. Schoolboy error. By the time he had finished, they were the size of beans. Cooking in our household is fiendishly difficult because Caroline and Sasha, my 14-year-old daughter, are both vegetarians. That means preparing at least two separate meals – although Ludo, 13, doesn’t like fish, so if that’s the main course, you have to do something different for him, too. Synchronising the cooking times of the different components in one meal is hard enough, but with three it begins to resemble advanced calculus. Needless to say, I did not pull it off. I even managed to burn the four-cheese ravioli, which was a ready meal. ‘Shall we order pizza?’ asked Caroline. HOURS SPENT COOKING Three DIFFICULTY LEVEL 9/10 BARTY’S TIP I SHOULDN’T HAVE IGNORED Act fast when it comes to pests or they will multiply. We have an ant infestation in our kitchen because I ignored the early warning signs.
SUNDAY
I BEGGED Caroline to let me have a day of rest and she relented. I’d assumed housework would just be drudgery, but some of the tasks required a level of skill completely beyond me.
True, I did get a sense of satisfaction from seeing the effects of my cleaning. For a moment or two, the rug looked fantastic. But then the kids came back from school and ruined all my good work. And that’s the trouble with housework: as soon as you think you’ve done it, you have to start over again.
Not surprisingly, my week of being a househusband has not left me with a desire to do more domestic chores. Quite the contrary.
But it has left me feeling more gratitude towards Caroline. The best thing about the week was giving her some time off, which she thoroughly deserves. The worst thing was the kids falling about with laughter every time they found the wrong item of clothing in their chest of drawers.
Without Barty I would have been completely at sea.
Next time I’m going to follow all of her tips to the letter.
CHIPS HAD TURNED BLACK AND FUSED WITH THE OVEN FLOOR. THIS WAS A JOB FOR A HAMMER AND CHISEL