Living in an orderly fashion

Jagraf

Faith177 wrote: »

Only thing i do everyday is wash up, do washing as OH needs his kitchen whites cleaned every night for the next day and hoover.

Only reason i hoover everyday is because of my pets I have two huskies who blow their coats and I average half a large black sack everyday between the two of them

When OH wasn't working such long hours we use to do a meal plan but there is no point now as only me eating so I please myself.

I'm very much a live in the moment kind of person so having everything too laid down would drive me mad

I used to feel like that - I don't take life for granted but now I'm thinking it would be good for me, financially and 'spiritually' to be organised.

I've just chucked about £15 worth of food away because we ate the newer food first as I didn't put it in the fridge nearest the front, iycwim.

fairy_lights

I don't really have any routines, my OH and I work different shifts so it's difficult to get in to a weekly routine. We just do housework as and when it needs doing, or wait until we've got people coming round and feel ashamed of how slovenly we are and tidy up

lostinrates

Routines here, with flexibility built in.

Partly because of animals Nd partly because of memory issues and budgeting.

Methods to support the routines include menu planning and shopping head over time, (with a mixture of trying to eat seasonally, reasonably healthy, not too meat heavily and eating high welfare animal products as much as possible).

I keep a 'short term' shopping list in the kitchen and scribble things from basic grocery supplies on it as they run out ( these get transferred to my ipad before I go shopping and added to the other things I need for menu plans) and I have a freezer inventory so I can 'shop' from the freezer when menu planning especially for proteins and puddings, we are desperately using last things now so that its empty for this years harvest of things.

I use my diary for scheduling in EVERYTHING else. Alarms for booking in vet appt,ents, giving wormers to animals, booking mot for car, everything.

Cleaning, fly lady is good, but even more basically, simply to tidy, I try and never go to bed with the sitting room/down stairs reception rooms not tidy ish. So that its easy to whizz through and clean. Kitchen gets a basic wipe regularly ( you can wipe benches in the time it takes kettles to boil, for example, or do a quick basic floor mop of quite a big room to look decent if not be surgically clean ) and a more thorough go on the same day each week ...- day I do yoga in there with an instructor.

The study gets pretty much abandoned more often than not and the bedroom gets pottered in and only really deep cleaned once every three weeks, ( but the linen changed once or twice a week).

The flexibility issue is that some days I can do less than other days. I've grudgingly got used to it and now accept that its better to go with my flow. If I continue on with my schedule less gets done and I cannot do much the next day. If I stop I might be able to do stuff the next day, or so etimes, later the same day. Its taken a very long time to see this.

What I have always done, and know the benefit of, is the benefit of short bursts of work......advert breaks make great lengths of time to do energetic cleaning on......tougher or louder jobs, the programme in between are better for recovering or, quiet jobs like polishing. Its the way i keep going after work, in the past, or now that I have long term ill health, music, or cleaning to advert breaks.

Faith177

Jagraf wrote: »

I used to feel like that - I don't take life for granted but now I'm thinking it would be good for me, financially and 'spiritually' to be organised.

I've just chucked about £15 worth of food away because we ate the newer food first as I didn't put it in the fridge nearest the front, iycwim.

Nothing wrong with being organised (i describe my house as organised chaos lol) just dont get too hung up on it if you can help it

I must admit I throw a lot of food out so now I've started to have leftovers more where as before i'd just eat what i fancy

For washing I have a pile in the bathroom that OH and my housemate know is the wash pile if it's not in there when I go to do the washing then it doesn't get washed. I do a general wash every couple of days and their work clothes everyday (they both work in kitchens) it meant that I stopped washing clothes that had already been done.

If OH is home or if my housemate and me have dinner then the rule is whoever cooks the other washes up and whoever feeds the cats the other feeds the dogs.

Other than that those 2 go about doing their own thing with me picking up behind them as I work less evenings than they do. My housemate however does do a big clean up for me on his days off only because I tell him that he is the best at cleaning the bathroom and the floors and that I can't get it looking half as good as he does :rotfl: poor boy believes me aswell :T

BarryBlue

Our only routine is meal planning. Every Thursday night we plan the following week's dinners with a view to our shopping on Friday. We then visit the butcher and a supermarket with a list if things we need rather than just doing a trolley dash.

This also helps in our diet & fitness regime. We have cut out all snacking by simply not buying the junk to snack on. Consequently we have both lost over a stone and a half this year and my twice-weekly visits to the gym mean I'm feeling better and fitter than for years. So our routine is certainly paying off.:)

Mr_Toad

I've never really understood routine.

Partly because my job involved troubleshooting and being on call and you can't stick to a routine when your life can change at short notice and you get a call at 4pm telling you your booked on flight to Germany or the USA at 10 the following morning, or need to be on the 7.30pm to Newcastle later that night.

Another part of me was horrified at the thought of knowing what was going to happen and when. Life is an adventure and not knowing what's going to happen is so much part of that.

I've never been on a package holiday, we'd drive to the airport as a family, even when the children were babies and toddlers, and ask what planes they'd got seats on leaving in the next couple of hours and pick one and then sort out accommodation, car etc. when we got there.

Or, get on a ferry and just drive off into France, Germany or Italy and when we arrived at somewhere we liked we'd rent a house or find a hotel.

I once worked with someone who had the same meals on the same day every week with no variation, ever. It would have driven me mad.

I've had some really great times, I once caught the ferry from Dover to Calais on my motorbike and ended in north Africa riding through the Atlas mountains and into the Sahara, it was wonderful. Another time I ended up riding through Germany into Denmark and Norway and up into the Arctic circle to see the northern lights.

Our children have taken after us and are very independent and will go anywhere and nothing seems to phase them. I have friends who need a months notice if you want to change the pub we go to, great friends but very little spontaneity and don't adapt well to new situations. I find that a little sad and their indecisiveness frustrating.

But it wouldn't do if we were all alike.

lostinrates

Mr_Toad wrote: »

I've never really understood routine.

Partly because my job involved troubleshooting and being on call and you can't stick to a routine when your life can change at short notice and you get a call at 4pm telling you your booked on flight to Germany or the USA at 10 the following morning, or need to be on the 7.30pm to Newcastle later that night.

Another part of me was horrified at the thought of knowing what was going to happen and when. Life is an adventure and not knowing what's going to happen is so much part of that.

I've never been on a package holiday, we'd drive to the airport as a family, even when the children were babies and toddlers, and ask what planes they'd got seats on leaving in the next couple of hours and pick one and then sort out accommodation, car etc. when we got there.

Or, get on a ferry and just drive off into France, Germany or Italy and when we arrived at somewhere we liked we'd rent a house or find a hotel.

I once worked with someone who had the same meals on the same day every week with no variation, ever. It would have driven me mad.

I've had some really great times, I once caught the ferry from Dover to Calais on my motorbike and ended in north Africa riding through the Atlas mountains and into the Sahara, it was wonderful. Another time I ended up riding through Germany into Denmark and Norway and up into the Arctic circle to see the northern lights.

Our children have taken after us and are very independent and will go anywhere and nothing seems to phase them. I have friends who need a months notice if you want to change the pub we go to, great friends but very little spontaneity and don't adapt well to new situations. I find that a little sad and their indecisiveness frustrating.

But it wouldn't do if we were all alike.

You might not have understood routine, but what about getting the kids to school and any extra curricular activities etc? Someone managed that sort of routine. My father worked an 27/7 job, my mother worked an unpredictable career much of the time, and I worked an unpredictable career alongside very stable ones of employment and self employment. The thing that ties them together for me is the routines.

I.e. When the phone used to ring in the middle of the when my mother and I were with my dad I remember she used to get his clothes ready while he was on the phone and I'd make him a cup of tea to take, he'd be ready when the driver arrived at the door within a few minutes.

Routines don't rule out flexibility in our house, they stop the wheels falling off when the unpredicTble happens.


E.g. Meal planning. I meal plan for approximate ly ten days. This covers two weeks because invariably there will be nights we don't want to eat a supper, rather a boiled egg, or nothing, or we might go out, or what ever, or failing all that, there are always the stock cupboard meals never planned for but the ingredients are always available for thanks to planning and good shopping organisation.

Mr_Toad

lostinrates wrote: »

You might not have understood routine, but what about getting the kids to school and any extra curricular activities etc? Someone managed that sort of routine.

Initially my wife would do this, she had a 'normal' job or if she wasn’t available for any reason one of our parents would step in.

Later on they went to boarding school so not a problem.

Jojo_the_Tightfisted

Things are getting more structured here now. We spent about six months in limbo when OH was ill and then another three recovering.

Quite often we'll talk at the end of the day about jobs to do or plans for the next couple of days.

Food gets bought as and when, mainly because it's dependent upon cash flow and what's reduced to clear in the supermarket. Over time we're building up stocks of beans and pulses, plus other basics.

There's a lot of juggling round various work commitments and, as we're getting used to doing this, there's a bit of scope for social stuff as well. I tend to hold everything in my head rather than write it down, so talking about it helps to fix plans there.

Washing gets done as and when there's a washload. We definitely have enough clothes between us to get by quite well. I'm rubbish at putting my clothes away, though.

The only thing that throws it is my natural sleep patterns. Like OH, I'm a night person, but I start work at eight in the morning, whereas he works evenings. I've had to get used to going to sleep with him working downstairs, but I'm still not getting enough sleep. And, as soon as I'm not at work, I instantly switch to Musician Time whether I want to or not - which means I was still awake at half four this morning after a week off.

OH was very big on routine for his kids, but it didnt translate to here for a very long time - we're getting there now, which is just as well now I've got anything up to five separate jobs to work around. I can see my having to phone him some days to ask him where I'm supposed to be.

lostinrates

Mr_Toad wrote: »

Initially my wife would do this, she had a 'normal' job or if she wasn’t available for any reason one of our parents would step in.

Later on they went to boarding school so not a problem.

So there was routine, of sorts! Boarding school also helped me realise routine helped me. My life outside school was not typical nine to five and yet was not disorganised, learning how better to combine the two made me feel even more in control. I've managed to live more economically, for example, than my parents by increasing g the level of 'home economics'.

I agree however, package holidays wouldn't suit me ( I went on a cruise once and it was an anathema to my sensibilities and won't ever do that again) though I do like revisiting places I have loved and lived ....just as well! But I love novelty and adventure. So long as I do not come back to chaos.