How to Succeed at Homemaking Without Really Trying: Make a List

Welcome to Part 2 of How to Succeed at Homemaking Without Really Trying! For part 1, you can go here.

Today, I'm going to talk about a strategy to help you get your mind in gear. I use this for cleaning, packing, organizing, cooking, and grocery shopping, and it has saved my life. It's three short words... are you ready?

I love these things

Make a list. It doesn't have to be long, fancy, or full of detail. Just make one. Most people respond really well to the sense of accomplishment and organization that comes with a list that's neatly crossed-off for the day.

Below the cut, I've shared with you some sample lists and ideas for how to incorporate lists into your daily life. Feel like you don't have time to make lists? You'd be surprised! Sometimes all my lists for a day take only five minutes, and I can write them while I drink my morning coffee.

I used to just jot all my lists down on the backs of envelopes and receipts as I thought of things. That's fine, but it's not super organized and if your list gets lost, you might be in trouble. So now I use Google documents to organize my lists online. I work on the computer all day, so if I think of something that needs to be added to a list, I add it right when I think of it.

How to Succeed at Homemaking Without Really Trying: Stop Looking at the Whole Picture!

Welcome to part 1 of How to Succeed at Homemaking Without Really Trying. This is written particularly for those of you who see the blogs and magazines and tv shows of fabulous people and immediately feel guilty and inadequate.

You know she's watching Living right now.

That's right.. now you can discover the fabulous secret knowledge that successful home-makers have always known! 

Are you ready? I am about to give you five shocking domestic secrets that Martha Stewart doesn't want you to find out!

Well, not quite. But I am going to give you a piece of advice that you might not have heard before: Stop holding yourself to someone else's standards, and stop looking at the whole picture. 

Wondering what I mean?

Fruit: How to Choose the Best

Let's keep on with our back-to-the-basics approach of the last week or two and talk about some of the simple, basic skills that everybody should learn if they want to improve the way they eat and cook. Today, the topic is going to be fruit--specifically, how to choose the best fruit from that big, appealing pile at the market.

This is a skill that you have to practice, but it definitely gets easier with time. Whether you decide to choose local, organic, or conventional is a decision I will leave up to you. This is about making sure that when you go shopping, you find the best, ripest, tastiest fruit out there.

Five Essential Ingredients for a Functional Kitchen

If cooking at home is still a fairly new thing for you, I'd like to help you out by letting you know about a few tools that are really essential for having a successful, functional kitchen.  If I had to start my kitchen over again from scratch, these are the first five things I would insist on making sure I got.

It can be really overwhelming to know where to start when you haven't already been doing the domestic thing for years. I'd like you to treat this as a sort of quick-start guide for spending more time in your kitchen and being more productive while you're there. 

It's taken me a while to work out exactly what should be on this list. How long? Well, I've been keeping house with Mr. Scrimp for two years. Before that, I shared an apartment with my best friend. I've been responsible for several kitchens at this point, and I've worked in a lot more.

These are the tools I can't do without.

Life Unedited

I've been thinking a lot lately about housekeeping mishaps. Like fashion magazines and stick-thin models do for body image, Better Homes and Gardens and Martha Stewart Living create beautiful pictures of totally imaginary things and then make us all hate ourselves for not being having a living room as amazing as so-and-so who just finished renovating his vacation cottage in the Hamptons.

I try to celebrate my ridiculous mistakes and domestic calamities, in the same way that I try to celebrate women and men who have not been airbrushed, and food that is not full of chemicals. Mistakes are how we learn.

For instance, shortly after getting married, I learned a very important lesson about checking my laundry carefully to make sure nothing has been sorted wrong...

The following is a true story. I wrote this two years ago, but I've never posted it on Scrimpalicious until now.

Menu Planner

I really like to have meals planned out advance, even if it's just something like "chicken on this day, beef on that day," et cetera.

So you can imagine how excited I was when I saw this awesome menu planner tutorial. I included both the first one I found, at our perfectly imperfect life, and the one that inspired that, at Thirty Handmade Days.

As you can see, the menu planner (made of a decorated cork board) uses clips for each day so that meals can be rearranged on a weekly basis. It features envelopes for recipe cards and to hold a selection of meal choices to be pinned up.

I think this is such a cool idea, especially if you can find a cork board secondhand where it often costs only a couple of dollars. And, of course, there's no end to the styles or colors you can use. The only limit is your imagination and your materials.

Mrs. Beeton's Household Management

Have you heard of Mrs. Beeton? In the 19th century, Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management was the Victorian homekeeper's bible.

That is one intense book jacket.

You can find the entire text online here. It's worth a read, if only for a chuckle over the way things have changed.  The book is primarily a cookbook, but also opines at some length about social conventions, visiting, managing servants, and caring for invalids.

I mention it because I read a quote from the aforementioned Mrs. Beeton in which she said, "What moved me, in the first instance, to attempt a work like this, was the discomfort and suffering which I had seen brought upon men and women by household mismanagement. I have always thought that there is no more fruitful source of family discontent than a housewife's badly-cooked dinners and untidy ways."

Obviously the blame for this no longer lies just at the feet of the housewife. But I'm curious to know, readers, do you think that bad dinners and an untidy house are a source of "family discontent"? Domestic stress? Mr. Scrimp and I certainly seem to have a much better time when things are really clean and organized.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

New Year's Resolutions: Declutter a.k.a. Throw Stuff AWAY!

Ok. You may ask, what am I doing writing a New Year's Resolutions post two weeks after the New Year? Well, they say that most resolutions are broken within two weeks. Isn't that awful? Yeah, I thought so too. For a while, my response to that was just to refuse to make resolutions. Then I thought, no, that's the wrong answer. I think the answer is to make resolutions more mindfully, putting a lot of thought into them beforehand and being sure well before the New Year that any resolution I make is a life change I'm ready to commit to.

My big resolution this year? Declutter. What does that mean for me? Throw stuff away.

That may seem weird to you. Or maybe not. Maybe you're nodding your head fervently as you read this, saying "oh my gosh, I have so much stuff I could get rid of! Oh, the clutter. Oh, the mess. Oh how I wish it were just more organized."

Now, let's be clear.