112 – 3 shifts for keeping house with a chronic illness

Hello loves

Today I want to share 3 shifts for keeping house with a chronic illness.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been the type of person that keeps my house immaculate, almost to show home level. I grew up in one. Everything had a place, and it had to be in that place except for the moment it was being used. As a creative I struggle to work in a tidy environment. If I am working on something the next day, I will gather everything together, but I won’t put it away. I’m in the middle of a massive redecoration and decluttering project through the house. Stuff is everywhere! It doesn’t stop me from having people over. Slowly it gets taken up to the car to go to the tip. What you won’t find, is dust. I am also not a minimalist. I have photos, and memories all over the place. And they need dusting!

Pre-illness I used to get home from food shopping on a Saturday morning, and would blitz my way through the entire house in a couple of hours dusting, hoovering, mopping. But when I got sick, it could take all day to work through the smallest room, let alone the whole house. And as for carrying the hoover upstairs…. Well, I bought a second one so I didn’t have to.

When I got sick I really struggled with how unclean the house felt.

In some ways, I was too unwell to care. In others, having an unclean house made me feel worse. I think my house was the first thing that I learned to say forget it about. Although I use a different F word… the orthostatic hypotension meant that standing wasn’t always an option.

So these are the 3 shifts I had to make.

1. Anything is better than nothing.

Even if you do some dusting in one room for 5 minutes each day, that is still something. Just hoover the areas of carpet and flooring that have the most traffic. No one uses my downstairs loo, not even me, so it’s clean. I make sure I pop some cleaner in the loo once a week, and give it a quick spritz after people have been round and that’s all. I would strip the bed in the morning, replace the fitted sheet and duvet cover over the afternoon, and put on clean pillowcases once I was in bed. Sometimes only for the pillows I use. I stopped wasting time rinsing dishes, and instead wiped them off into a little bin and put the dishwasher on twice if needed.

2. You will never have your home clean all at once.

Even when I cleaned weekly, come Friday the house was technically “unclean” again anyway. I changed from cleaning the whole house every week to one room a week. Daily priorities are sinks, kitchen worktops, and toilets. Over the years I have lived alone, with others, with kids, with cats, with dogs. I’ve had jobs that mean I’m home all the time, to ones where I’m out 14 hours a day. How and when I clean adjusts around it all.

3. Nothing will ever look as good as the day you bought it.

I love the look of stainless steel, especially in the kitchen. I hate the water marks! I now get kettles that have a powder finish so you can’t see them. I give the kettle a quick wipe of any water drops whenever I use it. I don’t buy things that need ironing. Things get stained, torn, misshapen. Detach from needing to keep everything pristine. I would remind myself of the amount of cleaning we had to do when my ex-husband and I moved into this house, so in many ways this house was still cleaner than then, and at least it was my dirt and not someone else’s!

You could always hire a cleaner, even if once a month to do the bigger tasks in the house. I mentioned that I got a second Dyson for upstairs. Not everyone can afford that, but to me the investment was way less than the expense of my energy dragging it up and downstairs.

What could you let go of around the house, and what needs to remain a priority, like the loo and the sinks?

And that’s it for this week.

If you enjoyed this episode, please share, so that we can get this out to other people who would like to take back the life a chronic illness stole from them.

And remember, you are worth it, and you get to choose.

Have a lovely day.