“Welcome to a home outside your home.” Hold on! Before you move in, may I announce to you, there is no home outside your home; those who made that statement to you are only gunning for your money in exchange for a stay in their hotel. Soon, you will be obliged to go back to your abode. The question is, are you more at home in a hotel than your home? The tranquility and decors of a five star hotel can be very alluring if you have no star or spark in your home.
I am going to play a scenario of a home which comprises of a man, his wife, two children, a female relation and a house help. This is assumed to be the composition of an average Nigerian home. Lessons learnt here can be applied to better your home, no matter the number of people resident in your house. It is also workable for a one person occupant.
It’s been a long day sweetheart, my shoe and tie hurt, the man says as he makes effort to fling them off his body. The woman, whose baby just defecated, has a greater task at hand, and pays little or no attention to her complaining husband, who throws off his shoe and tie to an unknown destination. It must have landed somewhere in front of the bedroom door, but who cares, definitely not him. She’s got the real baby in her hands, so she makes frantic effort and cleaned up the baby, fed her and sang her to sleep. She turns around and there sits her man panting for dinner. She serves him, did homework with the elder child, attends to some business as a cloth dealer, got things ready for the next day, and the list goes on and on. She barely finishes up for the day, reclines to get some sleep and a man gets to do what a man must do with his wife, curtains close. Now don’t imagine anything. Continue.......
The day hardly broke, with her prayer done, the routine begins again. Love you plenty the man says as he placed a peck on his lips and he is off again. Junior is set for school and the little girl gets trapped in the car seat for babies as they make the careful drive to Junior’s school. Back home, she calls some clients, ensures she makes some sales for the day. Again the family meal has to be ready. Thankfully, there is a house help and a working sister in-law to help, but the problem is, they never do and even when they do, they get it done in the opposite of how she wants it. Gosh! Very frustrating that can be. Her daily routine is crazy, she is lost in her concerns for her husband and baby, the man is lost with his concern to provide for the home, the house help and female relation is lost in their personal desires and a look at the state of the house, says it all; Tacky.
Welcome to Home Management Matters (HOMM101) - Own your space and manage it into the haven of your delight. We miss a lot of peace when we fail to make our home ambiance peaceful. Carried away by the care of the basic, food, school, work, business routines, we don’t even notice all of the broken pieces in our homes that can break us and our relationships. There’s too much trouble out there, our home must offer us serenity and inspire us to blaze through the troubles out there. The number one tip to a five star home is to own your space with the following tips:
1. Calculate your space – Don’t pick up the calculator you won’t need it. This is just a mental analysis of the space that is available for use. The space you have available should determine, the items you can take in. I am single, and like my marital statues I stay in a single room apartment. Before I moved into the apartment or even paid for the house, I stood in the middle of the room and did a mental arrangement of the house, that informed what I needed and I also got to know what I can’t bring in as a result of the size of the room. In the same way you take measurement to get a properly sized dress tailored for you, you need to measure your space and furnish it according to the size of your room. No matter how small your space is, you can have everything you need in it if you furnish according to size. Furnishing according to size saves you a lot of stress.
2. Organize your space – Once you are done with analysing the space, organise it. What will fit in where? I always will say, make space for everything in your house and keep everything in their space. Above I told you to size up your items to fit in your space, now that you have your items sized up; you need to fit them appropriately. Compartmentalise your space. Know where the bed should be, fridge, wardrobe, dresser, decors, mirrors, books, lamps, television etc. Every little thing should have their space and ensure everything stays in their place. On this point, there is something I do. I have a make shift space for certain things, so that if I can’t immediately keep things in their proper place, I have where I keep them until I am ready to put them in their original space. This will help avoid having things scattered all over the place, just because I don’t have the time or energy to place them properly yet.
3. Decorate your space – If your furniture is not up to date or trendy, you piss me off immediately. I get a shocker when a newly furnished place is done with antique design materials. I get too angry to talk most of the time. Even my dad in refurbishing his house did not make that mistake. A house made up of modern furnishing items, is easier to maintain. Curtains are no longer as bulky as they use to me. The lighter your curtains, the more trendy and easier to maintain. Don’t just size up and fit in, decorate. Add a lot of trendy stuff in your furnishing items. Peep online and follow Interior Majik blog for the latest furnishing designs and trends. Get help from Interior Designers and Decorators around (Will put up interior professionals here soon for easy access). Whatever you do, make sure your home is not just drab, but dazzling. (You can scroll on our articles here for great decoration tips.)
4. Organise your chores: Daily and Weekly – You ware yourself out when you do everything in one day. Understand the dirt power of your house, then schedule its maintenance activities to daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. There are some houses that you must sweep daily, I confess my room is like that, others you can afford to only mob weekly. Weigh your home’s dirt power verses traffic and do your cleaning timing. Don’t do measure cleaning of all the part of your house in one day. Except of course you are a full time house wife with no professional career. To enable you attend to other matters efficiently, organise your chores. Task like washing of plates, dressing of bed, sometimes sweeping are examples of daily task, washing of toilet, kitchen and other vital part can be done weekly or two times in a week. Cleaning of windows, washing of duvets and other heavy materials can be monthly. They are no hard or fast rule to this, do it the way appropriate for you. But don’t do too much of house work in a day.
5. Train and Delegate: Don’t play jack of all and master of none with your home. When only one person does the house work of where three people are staying, it is usually hectic and annoying. In the case of a house help, give her adequate training, which we offer, should you need our services. Contact numbers will be made available soon. In the case of co-tenants, house duties should be delegated appropriately. When only you become the master cleaner, you will definitely get tired. So let everybody know what to do and when to do it, in that case no one is overburdened and the work will be light for everyone and the house always tidied up.
For reading this far, you have a bonus of two extra points:
6. Be kind and show humour – There is nothing that makes a home serene like showing kindness and sharing laughing times. If you are overly forceful about tidying up a home, you will end up with a tidy unhappy home. Take it easy jare, be polite in asking that things get done and even make a humour out of it.
7. Stay with routines- From the listed items above, I am sure you have set things in place. Stay with it, be consistent and deliberate with the ambiance of your home.
Husband walks in, get a peck from his wife who welcomes him into a neatly kept home, all the stress disappears once he stepped into the house, he walks up to the room and hangs his things appropriately. Everybody knows what to do, things are kept in their place and chores are no longer a burden. The day ends, the lights are out, and a woman does what she needs to do. What a happy ending! Your Home does the magic. Don’t quench the stars in your home.
Home Management Matters series HOMM101 on my blog, Interior Majik is a must follow for all adults. This is the first article of this series. HOMM101 will be published on this blog every week on Wednesday and Saturday. It is especially written and packaged to revolutionize your home life, you will write to thank me soon.
On the next publication we will be looking at the “Genesis of Interior Design” taking a look at creation to see God’s intent for the ambiance of our homes. Don’t miss it!
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