Now that I'm a couple of weeks into my project and am not buying unnecessary stuff, I've been paying some attention to what is the next challenge for me.
Our house is always messy in places, and although I'd rather have a slightly chaotic but welcoming house than one that always looked like a show home, I do find it frustrating that as the kids get older, it doesn't seem to get any easier to keep things under control. When they were small I felt like I never had enough time to keep things under control. Now they are older and I have more time, there's a limit to how much of it I want to spend on tidying up after everyone else! There are certain areas where clutter builds up and when I'm wading through it, trying to sort things out, I find myself wondering why we have so much stuff in our lives.
A while ago I remember my father telling me about my grandmother's day looking after the house and family when he was young. They lived in a in a beautiful part of the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire. My grandfather worked as the gardener on a small estate and they lived in the gardener's cottage with their three boys.
It was a small house built in the 1920's. Two rooms downstairs and three bedrooms upstairs. The toilet was originally outside, but a large porch had been built over it and the coal store, so it wasn't quite so cold to go out there in the winter. The bath was plumbed into what was called 'the scullery room' next to a sink where they washed up. It had a large piece of wood or hard board which fitted on top so you could stack up the washing up on it, when you needed a bath you just moved the board out the way. At eight every morning after breakfast my grandfather would head out to work and my grandmother would get on with the housework. I'm guessing it was physically hard, there was a Rayburn cooker that also provided hot water to light, a fireplace to clean out, and washing to be done without a modern washing machine. My grandfather came back at 11 for bread and cheese, then at 1pm for a cooked lunch. But then after, she had cleared up my father said that 'the afternoon was her own'.
I remember thinking about this when my children were younger. I could easily spend a free afternoon going through my daughter's bedroom trying to sort her numerous toys into some sort of order. My dad and his brothers had a box of wooden blocks and cars that they played with. When playtime was over, it would take a maximum of five minutes to pick this up and the room was tidy again. So in the afternoon, my grandmother didn't spend all afternoon sorting the boys bedrooms. She went to the WI, or joined in with the village amateur dramatic group, or just sat down and read a book.
It's not that I think that life was better than ours. I'm guessing there would have been times when she was bored and felt cooped up living in a small village. I don't fancy having to finish the washing up before I could have a bath or clean my teeth. But it is interesting that with all our labour saving devices, we seem to have replaced the hard work of day to day living with being busy managing all the 'stuff' in our lives: physical clutter, paperwork, emails, information. Surely there has to be a better middle way. So I'm figuring that the next challenge for me is how to simplify things further to make more time for the fun and meaningful parts of life.
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