Plot the downfall of the bourgeoisie.
I just went from weeks behind on chores, to planning ahead.
Cooking and serving the rich
Edit: i just realised how this could be read in two completely opposite ways
Wash their sheets and pillow cases. Also vacuum. Dust mites are not healthy to have around.
Roomba is a lifesaver.
Agree. I thought they were overrated until we got one. They are like pets that clean. Ours has a cute punny name.
What’s it’s name? I named mine “Mr. Roombastic”
Paul Roombins
(In honor of Paul Reubens)
Ditto. Ours is called Tony, after the character Suckboy Tony from American Dad.
Mine is called Compsognathus. He’s my little scavenger and fits with a bunch of my Jurassic Park memorabilia.
Mine is super unreliable, plus what takes him 2 hours, I can get done in 30 minutes.
That’s 30 minutes that I don’t have to spend vacuuming.
Agreed. Apparently some people have issues with it but ours has been running pretty steadily every morning for the last 1.5 year or so. At some point the charging contacts were a bit dull and it started giving errors but otherwise the maintenance is minimal.
Oh but I can heavily recommend buy extra filters and when doing a bit more thorough clean of the dustbin just vacuum out the filter with another strong vacuum, or slap it on the floor a couple times to really get the dust out. Doing this and the suckpower increases tremendously and it also seems to more efficiently pack the dust in the bin by just having stronger suction, i guess
Robot vacuums are great, but my Roomba is incredibly unreliable. I’m buying Roborock next time.
My robot vacuum gets triggered any time I leave the house. Go out for dinner? Go to work? Grab coffee? Come back to a vacuumed house.
I know it’s better than nothing, but the reason I haven’t bothered to get one is that the vacuum guy on Reddit made me a solid believer in German bagged vacuums like Sebo. Almost everything else is exhausting dust everywhere it goes.
Exercise their water valves. Crawl under the kitchen sink and the bathroom sink, reach around behind the toilet, find the hot and cold valves behind the washing machine. Especially if you live in a hard water area as I do, in Southern California. I have it on my calendar to do it twice a year. If I don’t, the valves will eventually become calcified and ossified and worthless. I say this based on hard experience.
Do you mind ELI5 what exercising valves means? Is it just opening and closing?
Yes
I bought a house last year and had to fix my washing machine immediately. When I went to turn off the water the valves themselves started to leak. I had to turn off the water to the whole house to replace the valves. What would have been a simple, quick, fix ended up as.an entire day’s project.
Related tip: if your washer has rubber hoses running from the hookup to the washer, replace them with good quality metal ones. The rubber ones will eventually fail.
It depends what kind of valve they are. There is a kind that you don’t need to worry about that for. I don’t remember the terminology, I’m hoping someone who knows this stuff better will clarify my comment. The valves with the oval knobs tend to be the troublesome kind, the kind with a straight handle that only turns 90 degrees doesn’t need exercise and it’s unlikely to fail.
Your comment has been my experience. I’ve been a homeowner in the same house for 30 years. We did a remodel after we first arrived. Gotta say we were naive about many things, plumbing fixtures included. Most of our pipe valves were (as you described) those oval knob jobbies. They are simple compression fixtures that screw in for many turns until the valve closes. These are terrible, awful and very bad. Mine suffered corrosion and froze in place. We recently went through another remodel, and among other things, had all new valves installed. This time we used 1/4 turn brass valves. A simple 90 degree turn and the valve is closed. Much less susceptible to corrosion/rot, etc. They cost more during installation, but in the long run you save time, money and sanity.
The one possible downside is that you should try to be careful to close them slowly to avoid a water hammer effect.
Wash the sheets
Going over the counter with a swab and some random household spray soap. I think some people have the great habit to always keep the kitching clean, but we don’t, and I’ve noticed that when you really try to keep it clean it not only looks so much fucking more calm and not like a mind-pulling warzone of stuff to do, but I also noticed less (fruit)flies, which, now that i’m writing it, makes our kitchen sound fucking disgusting.
Clean the touchable surfaces on your devices and device keyboards.
Popping off all the keys on my keyboard, cleaning the base and washing the keys is so cathartic.
Blow out the dryer duct.
Clean the lint trap on your dryer.
I know it sounds like something everyone already does, but when I moved into my house I found the lint buildup astronomical. The previous owners had hung a clothesline in there because I’m guessing the dryer didn’t work well.
Is it DIY? This sounds like one of the things I’d rather hire a professional for.
Depends how long it’s been. If it’s not too bad, it takes 5 minutes if you have a leaf blower.
But if it’s been 20 years… https://youtu.be/-ukqhzvljvI?si=Bso65IJtZhlRKvbJ
Wow. Nasty! We had ours professionally done less than a year ago and I’m pretty sure it was expensive, so maybe I’ll look into DIY next time.
Not technically a chore, but a chore preventer: Close the lid before flushing the toilet.
I run an Airbnb hosting in a room on my house for like 3 years and I’m still amazed by how little people actually did it. Even after we sat a signal asking for it just above the flush button. Having feces particles all around your brushes, toothbrushes, towels, etc is an image nobody has but myself it seems.
This was disproved on mysthbusters
The mythbusters I saw proved it true. Odd.
They did a month of measuring a toothbrush for bacteria and found no real change after 30 days of using and flushing
Read a paper on this at some point, and this has become standard practise at home. Notice that visitting friends don’t do this, so I thought about looking framing the paper and/or some figures showing those plumes after flushing (can’t remember what paper it was but I guess searching pubmed for “toilet flushing” will easily give some appropriate results).
edit: OK “toilet flushing plume” did the trick and showed this marvel (see figure 2) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9732293/
I read it, and the big take away is that if you are out of the room in three seconds, no poop plume gets on you, personally.
J/K that’s true but I’ve always closed the lid anyway, 'cause it’s just polite.
Yeah I saw in the discussion that it is also not clear how it behaves with actual geval particles in the water. However I think multiple other studies have looked into spread of bacteria and viruses and showed this is found near a flushed toilet, but one recent review said the signs where there but it’s not certain it’s super significant for health. (If I remember correctly, i scanned them pretty fast in a coffee fueled random-interest vortex while I actually really wanted to get on with other things).
Oh and I think it can also help with humidy and mold in toilets? Seem to recall my sister did a BSc project on this and actually gathered data in our home. No clue how significant this was tho.
But yeah it’s also just polite, good habit to have i.m.o.
Damn Myth Busters!!!
Change your air filters regularly
As someone with a German shepherd, vacuum the carpets. You can never get that pet hair out enough, and just when you think you’re done there’s more! I can feel it pleasing my sinuses every time I vacuum
I often think that anyone who has ever had to remove carpet would never choose carpet as a floor covering. Vacuuming just isn’t really that effective. You always end up with heaps of this really fine “dust” (pet dander? dead skin?), it’s just gross. Hard floors are the only way.
I agree! Can’t wait to be able to have hardwood floors and put down a rug or two. But all this is so expensive so I’ll take the gross off white carpet for now
Flush your water heater once a year.
I know that I’m guilty of not doing this regularly, my dad, a former pipeftter and practically a living parody of the responsible homeowner dad who drove us all crazy with preventative maintenance routines doesn’t even do it regularly.
But it’s really not hard, I’m not going to write a guide here because if you just punch “how to flush a water heater” into your search engine of choice you’ll get plenty of good results.
It’ll improve the lifespan and efficiency of your water heater and decrease how much sediment and such you have in your hot water.
Also when you get a new water heater, replace the shitty plastic valve they all seem to ship with these days with a proper brass valve, it’s like a $10 part from home Depot and takes about a minute to swap them out. They probably use them because they know no one actually flushes their water heater anyway, but if you’re one of the few of us who do, you know how sketchy the plastic ones are, if you touch them more than about 2 or 3 times you feel like you’re going to break them.
How truly necessary it is will depend a lot on the quality of your water, if you have good, clean, soft water, it may not make a noticeable difference, if you have harder, dirtier water it might buy you a couple extra years with your water heater, and if your water quality is especially bad you may want to do it a couple of times a year. It takes a little bit for the tank to drain, fill back up and get to temperature, but it’s less than 10 minutes of actual hands-on work, and you can go do whatever the hell you want in the meantime as long as it doesn’t involve hot water.
You should also check and may need to replace the anode rod every few years, that can also increase the lifespan of your water heater. You’re probably going to need a beefy impact wrench though, they often really don’t like to come free.
I bought a house that was used as an office before getting remodeled and sold to to me. When I drained the hot water tank brown slime came out, it looked like a ribbon of brown mushroom. Gotta assume this was bacteria byproduct built up while the tank ran at low heat and saw little water use. I added bleach to sanitize while refilling it and drained.
Clean under/behind appliances.
Ugh even that big ass fridge and stove?
Especially the fridge, mine was so clogged with dust under it I think improved it’s efficiency by 50% in 2 minutes with the vacuum cleaner
Checking on your neighbors.
I think that’s a really good point. Of course it’s easier said than done, and any particular neighborhood environment could make it difficult to accomplish. I live in suburban Southern California. Our neighborhood is near the beach, about 150 years old. We have condo boxes, old post-WWII flats, ranch style houses, apartments, AirBnBs. I’m retired, loquacious, and I keep an eye out. I’ve met most of my neighbors, know them by name, and I try to stay out of their hair. I even say hello to the AirBnB peeps. We have an older lady next door, kind of a shut in. Never saw her outside. One day I left a note in her mailbox, introducing myself and my wife. Told her we were always around, and if she needed a hand once in a while (as we all do), we’d be able to help. She got back to me and was very grateful and happy I dropped the note. You never know, you might make someone’s day or even save their life.
Don’t know for other people but I should definitely clean my windows more often. I think I’ll do that today.
Yes, power drills can clean bathtubs and toilets. Just use different brushes.
Instructions unclear. Used forstner bits. Bathtub now has extra drainage.
Drill brush!
