The Least Effort Home
how to create more hours in a day
The thing about wealthy people, is they tend to enjoy a lot of leisure time. I’m not talking about the “leisure class”, who don’t need jobs or professions, and have fully empty dance cards to fill as they see fit. I just mean people who earn enough money to hire architects, interior designers and house cleaners, or who live in high-end rentals where these elements are part of the package.
Such people are able to outsource structure, order and tidiness, and this makes a great deal of difference. Their homes are set up to accommodate only what is needed, and those things - furniture, lighting, fabrics, rugs, etc. - are chosen for quality as well as beauty. Professional designers structure interiors for flow and functionality - everything is in the right place and there are specific spots to put things away. Kitchens feature high quality appliances and proper cooking tools. Maintenance is performed regularly by hired help and disorder is restored to order and cleanliness on a daily basis.
This is an extreme example of a Least Effort Home - one in which the inhabitants are essentially walking into a fresh Air BnB every day. Once you enter: Vacation Time! Fresh pasta for dinner? Get out the cookbook! Impromptu cocktails on the veranda? Why not! Time to cozy in with dogs, spouse and children by the wood stove? Don’t mind if I do! Take a couple of hours to go work on the ol’ novel? You betcha!
Wealthy people have time to do these things, because when they walk in the door in the afternoon they aren’t confronted with a list of tasks to perform. Such as:
clean out the front three inches of the refrigerator and pantry shelves to make room for the groceries
bring in the groceries and put them away
clean the dishes from when you rushed out the door this morning
throw in a load of laundry (you will have to do this load again tomorrow because you will forget to put it in the drier tonight and it will go sour. As a result, your five year old will have to wear dirty pants to school tomorrow morning - you choose the ones with more dirt, because the cleaner looking pants smell like pee)
walk the dogs
clean the upstairs bathroom because it has gotten too disgusting - the downstairs one can maybe wait another day or two
tidy the living room because you can’t find an important letter and you know it must be there, somewhere, in one of the piles
make dinner
clean the dinner dishes
Bed Time!
That’s the Family Version - similar scenarios of domestic chaos manifest just as easily in roommates and couples. Singles have it a bit easier, but in those cases, cleaning and tidying is often simply ignored in favor of doing other things - so you might have the leisure time, but your place is a mess.
How do you create leisure time, if you don’t have the money to outsource help? Well, I am speaking from my experience as a US citizen. In many places in Scandinavia and Europe (probably other parts of the world as well) the typical middle or working-class individual tends to be better at:
buying for quality rather than quantity (although I find it ironic that IKEA in the US is essentially just another recreational shopping destination)
eschewing clutter
keeping things clean
The first item on that list makes the next two items possible. Here in the US, we are power-sold absolutely everything. Forget about Fast Fashion - here we also have Fast Seasonal Decorative Items, Fast Furniture, Fast Home Improvement Projects, Fast Kitchen Trends, Fast Personal Improvement Equipment and - of course - Fast Food (and that is a very abbreviated list). Whether you can afford Williams Sonoma, IKEA, Target, TJ Maxx, Walmart or the Goodwill, there is recreational shopping for every budget.
This lifestyle is facilitated by America’s ubiquitous storage units. Roughly a fifth of American adults currently rent storage space, and that is a trend that appears to be rising. The greatest proportion of storage users are not space-squeezed twenty-somethings, but rather GenXers, needing extra space to store the things they can no longer fit in their homes.
I’m not pointing fingers - I have rented space in these hollow, grey corridors before. At times it is a logistical necessity. But if you are not careful, and you come to rely on this “extra space”, you will find yourself with a big, expensive closet in which to throw all of the things that you think you might need someday.
The push back against the typical American status-quo is called Slow Living, which involves buying high quality versions of the things you truly need. This means well-designed living spaces and very nice furniture. This lifestyle is showcased in certain high-end magazines and coffee table books, intended for audiences who are already “in the know”. It is essentially the middle-class European-type lifestyle, with a luxury edge.
What I wish to convey, is the know-how to create a “Slow Living” lifestyle on any budget. Because I feel it is typically the overwhelmed worker bee who stands to gain the greatest benefit from such a shift.
To get to that point, you must first quit recreational shopping.
Next, most people will need to purge all of their accumulated items that they no longer need. This can be a significant job, and it must be approached with the right attitude, or it will not be accomplished.
Next, you need to spend time designing your living space to accommodate your belongings. This involves assessing your needs and coming up with a plan (a design), which could (in turn) involve purchasing a chest of drawers, building shelves, installing hooks, customizing closets, buying baskets, building storage chests and boxes, and just generally getting comfortable with a screw gun and maybe a small circular saw. If you are a renter, these things can all be done (if necessary) without drilling into walls.
You may also need to rearrange and reposition various rooms of your home, to set them up for utility, beauty and flow (nice places to sit and convenient places to work, essentially). And since you are no longer engaging in recreational shopping, over time you can save up to purchase higher quality versions of the furniture, fabrics and appliances that you wish to replace.
With your home structured to accommodate all of the items that you own, you are ready to set up a daily tidying and cleaning plan, and to focus on establishing habits of dealing with dirt and clutter on an immediate basis. The daily cleaning should take no more than half an hour, and the immediate moment-to-moment cleaning (dishes, countertops, emergent clutter) should take an additional half hour. In this way, you should be able to maintain:
clean and tidy living spaces
clean kitchen
clean bathrooms
clean and ordered bedrooms
clean laundry
every day of the week. Projects such as maintaining order in the fridge, cleaning a pile of children’s toys or stuffed animals, putting clothing into seasonal storage, etc. can each be accomplished with a half-hour or so of monthly upkeep.
You will know you have gotten to this point when you have time to re-start your novel, or make handmade pasta on a Monday night.
ATTENTION!!!: Roughhousing will be going on Summer Vacation starting this weekend, for two weeks. The next article will, God-willing and the creek don’t rise, be posted on Tuesday, August 2nd.
Wishing you a good August!
Have a wonderful vacation!