The Library of Work and Play: HousekeepingGilman, Elizabeth Hale
General
The Library of Work and Play: Housekeeping
Gilman, Elizabeth Hale
Home economics
They should be put in a bathtub or sink when the rooms are cleaned, and
sprayed and sponged and soaked. This helps to offset their unnatural
life in warm, dry rooms. Plants thrive on attention. They love to be
stirred, and watered, and sponged, and petted, and made much of. If we
have only a few, we can treat them in this way, to their pleasure and
our own.
_The Process._--We have spoken of the substances which more usually
require the care of the housekeeper outside the kitchen and pantry,
and of ways in which they can be cared for. It will be well now to
describe the order in which cleaning is done, and to say a word about
the appliances used.
The first thing when cleaning is to be done is to gather the appliances
needed for the work. If possible one should have a broom closet in
which all the objects used in cleaning can be kept, then no time is
wasted in hunting them up. Two rows of hooks, one high and one low, in
some secluded spot will do instead of a closet.
I do not say that one cannot clean a room with merely a broom and a
duster. One can sweep everything with the broom, dust everything with
the duster, and take the dust up on a newspaper. Good appliances,
however, make work more thorough, more easy, and more interesting.
Those which I suggest here are merely such as I know to be useful. As
a woman learns her work and becomes more and more interested in it she
will choose and invent appliances for herself.
[Illustration: Photograph by Helen W. Cooke
The Broom Closet]
The following are the things I like to have to clean with:
A short step-ladder, not heavy.
A wool mop head with two handles, one long, one short.
A hair broom.
A mop handle with two heavy floor cloths.
A broom of medium weight, with a slim handle.
A furniture beater.
A long-handled dust pan.
A flat paint brush.
A whisk.
A piece of chamois skin.
Two cheese-cloth dusters, one damp, one dry.
Two flannel dusters.
Several dusting sheets.
Dusters and dusting sheets can be made of very inexpensive or old
material, and they are things in which it is well not to stint oneself.
Wool-headed mops are usually called, in shops, piano dusters, but
why should pianos have a monopoly of anything so comfortable and
convenient? They are rather expensive but they last a long time, and
can be washed perfectly clean. One can get along with one head and two
handles, if necessary, by dusting the high things first, using the long
handle, then the lower things and the floor, using the short handle.
After this the head must be washed, for the floors will make it too
dirty to use for walls. Wool gathers and holds dust more than any other
substance I know.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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