7 Essential Skills Every Homemaker Must Have. There’s a lot of fun and pleasure in homemaking, especially soon after your wedding, but there’s a part of homemaking that becomes really overwhelming – the housekeeping. That’s because the chores are endless.
In my first year of marriage, I didn’t enjoy the housekeeping part of homemaking at all but I had to do them. And in doing those things, I fumbled a lot especially with cooking and I felt really guilty when I messed things up in the process – like, I literally had no idea what I was doing. I just groped from one thing to the next.
One of the hardest chores for me was, cleaning. Everyone knows that having a clean house is important – if for no other reason, that germs and bacteria aren’t healthy. More so, now that COVID 19 is ravaging the world, the need to wash, clean, and sanitize frequently cannot be overstressed.
7 Essential Skills Every Homemaker Must Have To Accomplish Her Many Roles Successfully!
So, I try to keep everywhere clean and tidy but then, if you dropped by my house unannounced, you’d likely find at least one room that’s a disaster. The laundry might not be folded.
I desire a happy and peaceful home, as a diligent homemaker, and I realize that this will depend on accomplishing my many roles successfully. But I also want to enjoy doing them without stress. Determined to run my household efficiently, I acquired some fine skills and qualities which have helped to improve my homemaking art and made life for me and my family a lot simpler and more fulfilling.
If you struggle to enjoy homemaking like I was a few years back, consider learning a few (if not all) of the 7 essential skills described below:
1. Cooking
The first and most essential homemaking skills you need to learn is cooking. Cooking is the ability and capacity to prepare meals. It involves a range of activities including nutrition and age-appropriate kitchen tasks from food planning, preparation, safety, consumption, and much more.
Even if you have an amazing income and can hire a chef, you will still have to learn to cook because you have to take important decisions in the affairs of the kitchen, that’s your domain, and your chef will need a break sometimes.
Start learning to cook yourself. It’s not as difficult as you think. Just commit yourself to do it regularly; minimize your tools; get your ingredients ready before you start, get a cookbook that teaches techniques and is loaded with details on preparation; start with simpler meals and progress to more complicated ones, learn something each time you cook; and keep your kitchen clean always.
Having basic cooking skills set the foundation for family mealtimes. The more you can cook at home for your family, the healthier your meals will be and the less they will cost.
Check out Gwyn Novak’s How to Cook for Beginners: An Easy Cookbook for Learning the Basics.
2. Cleaning
The next essential homemaking skill you should pay attention to is cleaning. If you have a full-time job like me that gives you little or no time and you can afford a cleaning maid, by all means, go for it!
But even with a hired maid, cleaning will still be required of you regularly. Sometimes you may be so overwhelmed you don’t know where to start. Don’t worry.
Just follow these easy tips to get your house in order – Start your day by making your bed; stock your cleaning tools and agents; clean as you cook – don’t pile up dishes; wipe up messes as they happen; sort the mail; sweep the kitchen floor and sanitize all surfaces regularly. By the weekend when you have more time, you can do a general cleaning of the house with or without a maid.
As you begin to have children and they play around the house, cleaning will help you feel better and more confident about the hygienic condition of your house. It will also make it more of a home where you and your family want to return to when you go out.
Check out Anne Marie’s Organizing Your House for the best practical tips and ideas on how to clean your house and keep it clean.
3. Laundry
Again, with some good amount of money, I’m sure you can hire this out also. But for someone like me, I won’t, even if I could because I don’t like someone else touching my dirty clothes. To save me it’s a headache, I just do the laundry myself
Learning how to do laundry is not difficult. Today’s fabrics, detergents, and machines take most of the mystery and mistakes out of the process. Follow these basic steps for washable clothes and you’ll have clean laundry.
Start by sorting the clothes by colors and fabric; add an all-purpose laundry detergent to the dispenser; load the washer without exceeding the capacity; unload the washer when it is done to avoid wrinkles; load them in the dryer to dry, and hang or fold the clothes when they are dry and put them in the appropriate closet or drawer.
Get Cindy Harris’ Laundry Hints & Tips for your whole laundry routine, from washing and drying to ironing and folding. Have fun learning from it.
4. Organizing
Organizing is a skill closely related to cleaning. Keeping common areas of your home clean requires some level of organizational skills. But your real organizational skills will be tested when it comes to your pantry or closet.
It’s hard to be an inspired homemaker when every drawer and cupboard is a mess. Start by getting all irrelevant stuff out of your house. If you haven’t used it in a year, chances are you probably don’t need it. You must work at having a place for everything and ensure that everything is kept in its place always. Every member of the family must learn this.
Having an organized home makes it relaxing. It will lower your stress levels because you won’t be losing something or looking for things.
Caralyn Kempner offers great help in her Top-To-Bottom Home Organizing as well.
5. Preparedness
Preparedness is a homemaking skill and an important one at that. Learn to begin stocking your pantry and your freezers with the things that you use regularly so you don’t need to run out and buy stuff all the time. This homemaking skill will surely save you time and money especially if you have a large family.
Challenge yourself to see how long you can go without shopping. I try to shop only twice a month! The longer you can go without shopping, the better your family will fare in an emergency or disaster situation.
6. Teaching
Teaching is a great skill to have! When you have children, one of the main jobs you do is to teach them! You teach them life skills, hygiene, how to cook, how to clean up, manners, self-love, and now – with COVID 19, you have to go as far as homeschooling.
For starters, accept the trial and error method. You must understand that today’s kids are exposed to numerous influences, from media and the internet to peers, school, and even random strangers. Children observe and soak in everything and process it in their own unique way. Isolating the bad influences can be very challenging for a parent. That’s why you need to teach them early to discern good from the bad.
Depending on the age of your children, make a schedule, have a morning meeting, create a behavior management plan, provide a model, reach out to teacher friends or use the internet, cook together, eat together and play together.
Extraordinary Parenting offers authoritative, calm, credible advice that is easy to digest and put into practice straight away, as parents learn to navigate unthinkable circumstances.
7. Self-Care
This is the one skill that most of us struggle with the most. It’s easy to get caught up in all that needs to be done, and neglect taking care of ourselves.
When we don’t take care of ourselves, the rest of our work feels like a burden. We’re grumpy, we snap at people, we are not joyful and we are not attractive.
Taking a little time for self-care makes all the difference in the world. Get up before the kids every day and drink your coffee in peace; go out without the kids once in a while; take your vitamins and supplements daily to keep your energy up; get to the beauty salon twice a month; have a weekly date with your husband, even if it’s a couple of hours during the weekend.
Homemaking is a journey with no end.
Even when your kids are grown, you will always want to learn more homemaking skills or perfect the ones you already have. Your needs and schedules will change as the kids get older.
For anyone that you can’t do yet, leave it! Take the parts that work for you, and leave the rest. (7 Essential Skills Every Homemaker Must Have)
