The House That Cleans Itself By Mindy Starns Clark

This was an interesting book. I haven’t ever read a book on housekeeping before this one. The title is catchy. It perked my interest. Who wouldn’t want a house that cleans itself? I do not have a problem with housekeeping. I love it, and I’m good at it. My husband on the other hand isn’t quite as gifted in this area, and therefore, I read this book to better understand where he’s coming from. I realized from this book that there are some people who are sincerely housekeeping impaired. It’s not that they don’t have the best of intentions. It’s not that they don’t try hard. They just aren’t good at it. What seems so obvious to me at times, baffles my husband. I believe in just getting things done and keeping order, but I now realize, this isn’t so easy for other people.

There were many things that stood out to me in this book. The author uses the motto “There’s a place for everything and everything in its place.” It’s a great one, and if truly utilized, it does keep a clean house. The backbone, however, of the author’s House That Cleans Itself strategy is to change the house to fit the behavior as much as possible and then change the behavior. She maintains that if it was possible for housekeeping impaired people to change their behavior to magically become competent, this would have happened already. Therefore, it is easier to change the house as much as possible to make it easier. This makes sense to me because this is probably what organized people do innately. What follows in the book is a plethora of ideas on how to do this. In a sense, this book is about getting a house as organized as possible, so that it can more easily stay clean.

I enjoyed many of the little housekeeping tips, such as using a lint roller to clean a lampshade amongst many others. Little tricks like that make cleaning so much easier. She also gives pointers on what furniture to buy or how to redo a kitchen or thoughts on purchasing carpet. All these things play a roll in how much cleaning is necessary. Some types of flooring hide dirt. Some types of furniture hide dust, while others show all the dust. Some surfaces show fingerprints, while others don’t. A house can either be functional or it can make cleaning so much harder than it needs to be.

One of the greatest points this book makes is in regards to the length of time it takes to clean things. The author states that people who aren’t very efficient with cleaning often over estimate the time it takes to clean things. This describes my husband perfectly. He can spend a whole day working at something, feel exhausted when he’s done, and yet not actually accomplish cleaning it. I’m not talking about deep, once a year cleaning either. I mean something as simple as cleaning the kitchen. This is something I utterly do not understand, and continually have to work on accepting of him, but this part of the book helped me make sense of what is going on. She lists times for how long it should take to clean certain things and also encourages readers to time themselves doing things to give a little perspective. She also emphasizes the need to learn how to quick clean and how also to clean and straighten little things in stolen little moments such as while waiting to tuck the kids in at night while they get ready or while waiting for the water on the stove to boil, etc. There’s always an opportunity to do a little something that helps maintain the home. Then there is not as often of a need to take hours at a time to clean something because it, for the most part, stays clean. This seems so obvious to those of us who are good at housekeeping, but I suppose others need to learn this. Some people see the mess and just automatically know how to clean it, while others just don’t have any idea where to start.

One last thing I’d like to mention that was vitally important for the book to point out was about the emotion of housekeeping. Cleaning shouldn’t be emotional. It’s just something that has to be done. There should be no emotion tied to it. If someone is struggling with either despising or craving cleaning, then it is time to examine why. I wish the book went a little more into detail on this topic, but at least, it was touched upon. A light bulb went off in my head when I read this. Cleaning is very emotional for my husband, and we are working to figure out why. Contrasted with me, I just do it with little thought about it. This was a great revelation for us.

There were only a few things I had trouble relating to the author on. The author has a little too many organizational tricks that I found some of them a bit ridiculous. If they work for some people, then great, but I thought they put in more effort and work than would actually be helpful. For example, every Sunday after church, the author has a special clothes bag in her closet complete with a shoe holder in which she places next week’s outfit, finished off with jewelry and shoes that she can’t touch all week, so she is ready and on time for church the following week. As someone who is already organized, this seems like way too much work to me. I can’t imagine someone who isn’t organized would be able to stick with that. I would rather stick to a laundry schedule so that at least one church outfit is clean. I’d rather keep all my shoes lined in one place in my closet so I can grab the ones I need in a hurry. Same with my jewelry. If you have so much jewelry or shoes that you can’t keep them organized, time to get rid of some. This would be easier and makes more sense to me. The author seems to give this type of advice a lot in this book. She gets really creative with her ideas for things, but many of them would create more work for me. She’s very big into creating stations. They even have a whole closet in her house devoted just to traveling. They keep their suitcases, maps, and everything they need in one closet. I can’t fathom having enough room to devote a whole closet for that no matter how big my house is. The logic of the way she organizes some things seems illogical to me. I like specific things to go in each room, such as the kitchen is for my dishes and cooking utensils, not the things I’ll need to mail thank you notes, even if I do like to sit at the kitchen table to write them. The author seems to feel that in her case if her utensils for correspondence are not right at her fingertips, she’ll neglect to do it. Maybe so, but I would feel totally crazy and unorganized if I followed all her advice in the book in the way of organizing. So many things just felt totally out of place to me as I read her describing everything.

All in all, a lot of the advice in this book is sound and I can verify that people who are naturally organized and like to clean do most of this advice naturally. But if some people need to have these things pointed out to them so they can become better at housekeeping, then I think this book is wonderful. My husband is reading this book next. We’ll see how it goes.