The Library of Work and Play: HousekeepingGilman, Elizabeth Hale
General
The Library of Work and Play: Housekeeping
Gilman, Elizabeth Hale
Home economics
The next heaviest periodical work to the washing is the weekly
cleaning. In a household with two maids or less, the cleaning should
not be the periodical work on more than two days, one for upstairs, one
for down. The living room and the dining room will probably have to be
thoroughly cleaned each week, but the other rooms can usually be done
in alternate weeks with the help of the daily setting in order and the
careful use of a sweeper two or three times in the interval. It is more
immaculate and more agreeable to have all the rooms thoroughly cleaned
each week, but in a fairly large house with two women to do the work
this ideal may become a grievous burden.
In houses in which there is an ample number of servants, the cleaning
of the downstairs rooms, daily and periodical, is often done before
breakfast. It is the ideal way of accomplishing this disturbing and
uncomfortable job, but it cannot be so done unless there are enough
workers in the house to divide the work into distinct departments.
Baking, cleaning the refrigerator and food receptacles, cleaning the
kitchen and looking after the garbage can is the work of the cook. If
there is another maid in the house, the cook has the four days of the
week not used for the laundry work when she may do these things. If
she is the maid-of-all-work, she will have the two days left from the
laundry and sweeping in which to do them and many others.
Bread baking is usually done twice or three times a week. Cake baking,
nowadays, is an irregular performance. As making bread is not a day's
work, it can be combined with other pieces of work, preferably with
those which are done in the kitchen. It combines nicely with cleaning
the refrigerator and food receptacles because one of these is for bread
and should be perfectly fresh for the new batch. A careful housewife
sometimes makes the cleaning of the refrigerator her own work, but even
so, she will appoint a time for doing it. A good refrigerator need
be cleaned only once or twice a week, a poor one may have to be done
oftener.
A garbage can should be cleaned as often as it is emptied, and should
with its surroundings be watched all the time, lest the cover is left
off or any scraps or splashes are left outside to draw flies and make
disagreeable odours.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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