managing your house

House keeping is about so much more than cleaning a house. Until the fifteenthcentury, cleaning

was a peripheral activity to the central tasks of preparing food, gathering and chopping wood and other fuel, keeping the house warm, andgetting water. Laundry is not much of a problem when you don’t have a change of clothes. When the animals that are your livelihood need feeding, who’s going to worry about dust on the mantel?
What is the clever house?
Now that we live in a time of excesses, we have new considerations. Our precious belongings—be they laptops, loofahs, or lingerie—need caring for. These days we think more about the environmental impact of our actions—whether it’s flushing cleaning-product residue down the drain or the amount of clean water and fossil fuels we use in heating water to wash our clothes. We are increasingly aware that just because a chemical removes stains effortlessly or a paint lasts year after year, it does not guarantee that it’s nontoxic and safe near children, or even safe to use regularly.
Added to that, we want our houses to be havens. Somewhere we can escape to, away from the daily grind of weekly grocery shopping, office politics, and playground banter. Our houses are more than roofs over our heads—they are also our homes.
Clever housekeeping incorporates a number of interrelated ideas: that a house should be healthy, that living in it and maintaining it should not take an undue toll on the environment, and that it should be comfortable and safe to live in, not unnecessarily expensive to maintain, and efficient to run on a day-to-day basis.
The cleverest of clever houses incorporates all of these aspects. In fact, it is hard to do otherwise. For instance, when you choose to clean your bathroom with safe and gentle baking soda instead of a store-bought cleaner, you are not only making a green choice that could save money and has less impact on the environment, you are also creating a healthier and safer home environment for you and your family. When you plant a deciduous tree that will shade your house in summer and allow light and warmth in winter, you are making a green choice that could ultimately represent a savings on your power bill (a savings for both you and the environment), increase the comfort of your home, and contribute to a healthier atmosphere. Clever, indeed!So let’s take a closer look at all the aspects of a clever house.
Healthy house
A healthy house benefits from sufficient fresh air entering, with enough ventilation to ensure indoor air pollutants are regularly removed. Good ventilation also ensures a house is not too humid, which in turn helps keep it free from excessive mold and bacterial growth.
A healthy house is supportive and considerate of allergy sufferers. Simple measures can help—letting beds air, opening windows for ventilation, keeping sinks clean, and keeping a check on mold growth around plugs and faucets. Knowing how to effectively clean and, where necessary, disinfect around the house keeps bacterial populations below disease levels. It also encompasses knowledge of the cleaning products we use that may irritate or even poison in the wrong doses and in the wrong hands. The more we know about the chemicals that we encounter every day, the more we can make informed choices about their use.
A healthy house accommodates the various needs of all members of the family—even the family pet—and still remains healthy.
Increasingly, too, the notion of a healthy house covers choices in furniture, carpets, curtains, and decorating options—we don’t put lead in paint anymore, but are there other substances in some paints we might wish to avoid if we knew more?
Green house
An environmentally friendly house is an energy-efficient and comfortable one—warm in winter, cool in summer, light enough in key rooms, and pleasant to be in because it is well ventilated and smells fresh. The green house takes less of a toll on the environment—and also on the pocket. Ideally, it is sited and landscaped to take maximum advantage of the sun’s light and warmth in all the seasons of the year. It relies less on nonrenewable energy sources (such as coal) by making the best use of low-impact, renewable energy sources (such as sun and wind). The green house is a low-polluting one, not only in terms of the energy sources it uses, but also in the products that are used within its walls. Because it is also a healthy house, the green householder chooses organic cleaning products in preference to harsh and polluting chemicals. Water is conserved and reused when possible.
Recycling is a vital component of the green philosophy. From water and organic waste to recyclable building materials and packaging, the green house minimizes the production of garbage and landfill. The options available to householders for reducing the impact of their homes on the environment are growing daily and range from actions as simple as choosing reusable cloth bags over plastic at the supermarket to solar water heaters, signing on to green power sources, and even selling solar-produced electricity back to the local grid.
Efficient and safe house
When you run an efficient house, the money you save can go to other expenses such as vacations or music lessons or in a bigger house. It can ensure that you are able to make ends meet. There are numerous ways to save money here and there—from choosing energy-efficient appliances and fixing a leaking tap to growing a few vegetables (even a pot of herbs on a windowsill) or shopping in bulk.
But being efficient does not just mean being energy efficient. The efficient house ideally has a place for everything and (on a good day) everything in its place. Clutter is reduced to a minimum. In an efficient house, there is a list of emergency numbers near the phone, you can always find your umbrella, and that bill that needs to be paid today is right at hand—not buried somewhere in the middle of a mountain of papers on the dining room table!
A safe house is not only a healthy one, it also provides a physically safe environment where inhabitants of all ages can feel secure. Safety measures are often a matter of common sense and very little financial outlay. The safe house has fire alarms, circuit breakers, child-proof safety devices for toddlers, security rails in the bathroom for the elderly or infirm, outdoor lighting, a readily accessible first-aid kit, and a lockable storage space for medicines and other potentially dangerous substances.
How clever is your house?

The following chapters of this book will give you all the information you need to choose your individual path to creating your own clever house. If you feel the urge to change the way you run your home, you’re more likely to be successful if you adapt it, and your lifestyle, gradually. You could start with using fewer toxic cleaning materials and decorating products, and consider the more expensive items, such as furniture or flooring, energy-efficient large appliances or solar water panels, as they need replacing. If you feel overwhelmed by clutter, tackle one room—or even one cupboard or one shelf—at a time. And remember, even the smallest changes can make a big difference. You’ll be running a clever house before you know it.