One more list- For Sarah

Sarah mentioned that she'd have to keep these lists in mind for when she gets married, so here is one more list for her. I'm seeing some registry ideas here! ;-) This list is of tools that everyone needs if they plan on keeping house! Fun!
1. The original Swiffer- this can be acquired at Wal-Mart for about 10 dollars. Unlike the newer versions, such as the "wet-jet," This swiffer has holes on the top corners of the scrubbing pad where the cleaning rags are stuffed in and held in place, so you can easily make your own rags instead of buying theirs. I have cut several rags to fit. When I need to use them, I simply spray them down with a mixture of Pine-Sol and water (but you can use whatever cleaner you wish). This is great for scrubbing linoleum floors. I personally think it works better than most mops, and you don't have the hassle of trying to keep the sponge clean because the rags can just go in your normal wash. It is much less hassle than dragging out a mop bucket and much faster than scrubbing on your hands and knees. I also use this for scrubbing out my tub and the shower walls. It goes soooo fast. :-) When I'm done cleaning, I just pull off the rags and throw them in the hamper. I save a lot of money buy avoiding the expensive wet wipes you buy for the same purpose.
2. Plenty of ratty old tee-shirts to cut up for rags. Cheap and convenient, these can be cut to custom sizes, as above, and reused. When they are worn out, you can throw them away guilt-free, because you'll probably have plenty more t-shirts that are ripped or stained by then.
3. Spray bottles of assorted sizes- These too can be bought at Wal-Mart, usually for less than a dollar. For bigger bottles, check out the cleaning supplies aisle. For smaller bottles, check out the hair and travel accessories. You can fill one with diluted pine-sol, like I do for the floors. I spray it directly onto my cleaning rag, but if you have something tough that may need to soak for a minute, you can spray it straight onto the floor. Sometimes, just for a thorough clean, I spritz down the entire kitchen floor and let it sit for a minute before I scrub it off. It only takes a minute with a large spray bottle to spray the whole floor. The nozzle can be adjusted to spray a wide or narrow stream. I also fill a small one with diluted dish soap. On occasion, I actually get around to doing dishes right after a meal. When I am having lunch at home by myself, it's easy to wash my one plate, fork, and glass. I spray it down with the soap, scrub it, and give it a rinse. I just use a small amount of soap in the bottle and fill the rest up with water. It has enough soap to cut the grease. This allows me to do very few dishes without wasting lots of soap. You could also fill a bottle with vinegar and water for cleaning glass mirror and windows. Vinegar, especially when diluted, is a good deal cheaper then glass cleaner and will clean it just fine.
4. A LARGE bowl, big enough to hold dinner plates- You think you will always do dishes after a meal. You won't. Okay, there are probably a few saintly people who religiously do their dishes right after they eat, but I am not one of them, and I believe statistics would suggest that you probably aren't either. I always intend to, and sometimes I do, but most often, they wait a meal or two. If you have a dishwasher and are faithful about unloading it right away, you can easily rinse your dishes and stick them in there right after a meal, but my dishwasher does not work, and when it did, I was NOT faithful about unloading it. :-D As a result, dirty dishes piled up in my sink and on my counter. I was slightly embarrassed for people to wander in my kitchen and see the mess, and my poor husband was going crazy with all the clutter it caused. You think dirty dishes are just dirty dishes, but they aren't. They are clutter monsters. They take attention away from anything in the kitchen that may actually be clean, making the whole thing look like a mess. They also take up counter space, forcing other things to migrate to other surfaces on the kitchen, like the table, which clutters the whole kitchen. In short, they discourage you from going into the kitchen, which makes it difficult to keep it clean. I finally solved this horrid problem with a large plastic tupperware bowl. I cleaned out one half of my undersink cabinet for my bowl. Whenever I have dirty dishes that I cannot get to right away, I put them in the bowl. It is like a hamper for dishes. No one thinks you should leave your dirty laundry sitting out for all to see until you are ready to wash it, so why should we do that with our dishes? Company comes and my kitchen looks spotlessly clean, even though my breakfast dishes have not yet been washed. What's more, most things will almost self-sort when you use a bowl for dishes, because it's easier to stack plates together, bowls together, etc. so the washing goes quicker. When I am good and ready, usually sometime in the afternoon, I pull the bowl out and do the dishes. At the end of the day, when I am too tired to stand on my feet and do dishes, the supper dishes go into my now-empty bowl for tomorrow afternoon. This is the best tip EVER for those of you without dishwashers!
5. Old socks- I use these to dust. You could use your other rags, but I like socks because I can slip them over my hand and dust away!
6. A handheld cordless wet-dry vacuum- this may be one of the best household tools you can buy. I two of them for wedding gifts. I thought, okay, I can leave one in the car and one in the house, but the one never made it to the car, except for brief excursions. I find it useful to keep one in the living room and one in the kitchen. They are great for when you spill tea on the carpet, which will undoubtedly happen. You can grab the wet-dry vac before it soaks in and suck it right up. I also use mine to clean my couch and recliner. I use it for sucking down spiderwebs too. It's easy to just walk around the corners of the room and suck down the cobwebs. It's quicker and easier than dragging the regular vacuum around the entire perimeter of the room, and it's less messy and more effective than using a broom since it sucks the webs in and they are gone. Also, I have always been a hater of dustpans. You CANNOT get all of the dirt swept up in one. I just sweep my kitchen or bathroom with the broom, and when I get it all in a pile, I suck it up with the handheld vac. It's waaay easier than a dustpan! I also vacuum area rugs with them and spot vacuum crummy spots in the kitchen when I'm not ready to sweep the whole thing or if there was a small spill. When the filters get full, I empty them in the trash, rinse them in the sink, and stick them back in. There's no need to wait for them to dry, because it's wet-dry! Okay, I never thought I'd feel so much enthusiasm over a vacuum. I also use my wet-dry vac's when I clean the cars out. They have a nice little crevice attachment that gets into the small spaces. They are handy to use. I have cleaned out cars with a huge shop vac before, and it does the job, but it's so bulky and cumbersome that it takes forever and discourages people from vacuuming the car very often. With my little handheld, I vacuum my car out about once a month, unless it needs emergency intervention. :-) This regular cleaning keeps me from needing the heavy duty cleaning power of a shop vac. This is a wonderful tool. Mine is a Dust Buster 9.6 volt wet-dry vac and can be found at wal-mart for about 25 or 30 dollars.
7. Scrub brushes of various sizes-also under a dollar at Wal-Mart, These can be used for dishes, floors (they're great for dirt, etc. that gets stuck in the grooves and pits of linoleum) and even tablecloths. I love tablecloths, and I have a small brush I keep just to brush crumbs from my tablecloth.
8. A spare grill brush with a sharp scraper on top-If you have hard water like we do, this brush and scraper combo is great for scraping the hard water buildup from around the sink and brushing it out of shower heads and the sink sprayer!
9. A nice, easy to tote laundry basket- It's important that it be easy to carry. I keep mine in the bedroom. When we get undressed in the evenings, dirty clothes go straight in the laundry basket. When I get up in the morning, the basket goes with me to the bathroom, where it is sorted into the hamper. Husbands are notoriously bad about putting dirty clothes in the hamper, but if you have a laundry basket right there in the bedroom, and they don't even have a hamper lid to open, they are more likely to actually throw their clothes there instead of the floor. If your husband actually carries his laundry to the nearest hamper and deposits it in the proper fashion, please send me his mother's name and address so I can hire her to train my darling husband. :-) He really does a great job with the basket, aside from socks, which land in front of the couch. After you empty the basket into your hamper (I'll get to the hamper in a second), start a load of laundry and put the basket in front of the dryer. IT IS IMPORTANT TO USE THE SAME BASKET IF POSSIBLE! When the clothes have been washed and dry, dump them into the basket. This will encourage you to fold them and put them away ASAP because, you will want the basket to be empty and back in your room by evening to avoid having to pick clothes up off the floor. I usually carry the basket into the living room so I can watch TV or listen to something while I fold.
10. A divided hamper- This is very, very important. If you hear nothing else I say, hear this. I have a hamper with three compartments. I bought it at Target for a reasonable price. It has made my life much easier. I put whites in one compartment, colors in another, and denim articles in the third. (Some people may prefer to put delicate garments in the third, but I don't baby any of my clothes. I abuse them all, so if they won't stand up to the regular wash cycle, I probably don't want it anyway, but suit yourself). This makes it very easy to do daily laundry. When I want to put a load in, the sorting is already done. When I have children, I hope to give each of them a laundry basket for their rooms. When I get more laundry, I will get another divided hamper to accomodate. The plan is, every morning when they head into the bathroom, they will take their basket into the bathroom and deposit their laundry into the appropriate recepticals (I like big words :-)) If this does not happen, somehow, someway, I will make them wish it had. Maybe they can be responsible for everyone's laundry that week or something, bwahahaha! When I am ready to do laundry, it will all be sorted for me! Yay! I would put off laundry forever if I had to sort before running a load. This keeps me on track because it only takes about 30 seconds to stick a load in straight out of the hamper.
11. An organized schedule of chores that need done each day, week, or month and when exactly you plan on doing them- I take back what I said about the hamper. It is important, but if you can only remember one thing, remember this instead. I am a person who desperately needs deadlines. Without a deadline for something to happen, I can put it off indefinitely. It is easier than you think to look at the huge amount of work that needs done in your house and be at a loss for knowing when to start. About a month into my marriage, Arthur and I were at each other's throats about the state of our house. It is one thing to keep your bedroom and even your own bathroom clean, but when you are responsible for a whole house full of other people's messes, it is much harder to stay motivated and on-task. One day, it was just so frustrating, that I decided SOMETHING had to change. If I were getting paid to keep someone else's house, I would not have let it get like that. I decided to approach my own house the same way. I needed to tell myself what I wanted done in my home, how I wanted it done, and how frequently I wanted that to happen. In essence, I hired myself as housekeeper. I got a few sheets of paper and went through each room of the house individually. I wrote down everything I would want to clean in that room if I were going to seriously clean it, like spring cleaning clean. When I had my lists for each room, I went through and determined whether I'd want each task done daily, weekly, or monthly. The daily tasks, I wrote on one sheet of paper under the titles "morning", "afternoon", and "evening", though that schedule is fairly flexible. I included devotions on that list to help me stay on top of them. I look at my task list several times a day, and it helps me remember things that could easily be overlooked. The weekly jobs I put on another sheet of paper. I do the weekly chores for the bedroom on Monday, the spare room on Tuesday, the living room on Wednesday, and so on. For the monthly tasks, I figured that there are usually four weeks in a month, so I wrote "week 1" with lines for Monday through Friday, then "week 2," and so on. I divided the things I wanted done monthly as evenly as possible on those lines. In months with five weeks, I use the time for make up for things that got skipped for some reason or other, projects I've been putting off, such as sewing, just extra relaxation, or personal things that are fun to me, like reading a book, playing the piano, or doing "fun shopping," as opposed to just "grocery shopping," because you've got to take time for yourself once in awhile. Even Jesus tried to find time off to himself sometimes! I have worked to consistently stick to my schedule while still allowing it some flexibility. For instance, some things that I thought I'd want done weekly get done every other week instead, because they don't really need done every week, but I'd like them done more often than once a month. Also, some chores go really fast, because I don't necessarily have to complete them, just check on them. For example, one day a month I check all of the light fixtures. If they need taken down and washed, I will clean them, but most of the time, they are still clean. If you make a schedule and stick to it, it will take you less and less time to finish your chores as the weeks go. The first time I cleaned my kitchen by my new schedule, it took probably 2 hours. Now it takes me 30-45 minutes to get it THOROUGHLY clean. Part of that is because things are already fairly clean, so there is less scrubbing involved, such as inside the fridge and microwave. Also, you get faster at doing it, because you go through the same routine everytime and don't need to think about it as much. You also miss less, because you get a system going. FINALLY, you will not stress much over your house when company comes, and you will not stress when some darling man in your life or a visiting child leaves a room a bit messy, because you have a system for dealing with it. You do not have to drop everything and deal with it right then. There is a day and time scheduled for dealing with that. The whole house will be clean again by Friday! Some may say that this is easy to do if you stay at home as I do, but it's hard if you work. However, I think it's all the more necessary if you work. I never was a fan of heavy scheduling, but this simple tool has taken soo much stress off of me and freed up a lot of my time rather than taken more of it. Afterall, it takes far less time to constantly maintain a clean house than to constantly try to stay caught up with a messy one! If you make your own schedule, you can determine how much you can handle in one day. It is not imperetive that your schedule be as full as mine. The important thing is that you have a plan for when things get done to make sure that they DO get done. You can take as much or as little time as you need. I clean one room a day, but you could spread that out over two or three days and just take 10 or 15 minutes a day tidying up the whole rest of the house if you needed more time to complete the tasks. Either way, a plan saves you constant headache! Maybe you don't need this advice, because you're a bit more organized than I am, but here it is anyways!

I know that this was long, and maybe you didn't read the whole thing, but I hope it has been helpful in some way. I love you, cousin, and wish you the best in your upcoming marriage!