Dad's Own House-Keeping Book

by Bowers, David

• ISBN13: 9780761136675
• ISBN10: 0761136673
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-05-24
• Publisher: Workman Pub Co

Summary

Just because you're born with a "Y" chromosome doesn't excuse you from cleaning the bathroom, especially in this day and age when time's at a premium and partners have to be, well, partners. To help men step up to the plate (and wash it) is DAD'S OWN HOUSEKEEPING BOOK, the book of everything your mother never taught you about taking care of a house. Written by a real guy, in a real guy's voice and with a direct guy-to-guy point of view, DAD'S OWN HOUSEKEEPING BOOK-in the spirit of Dad's Own Cookbook, with 270,000 copies in print-takes even the most Swiffer-challenged dad and shows him that housekeeping is no different from yard work, that if you can organize your shop you can organize a kitchen, and if you can load a trunk you can load a dishwasher. From laundry room to attic storage, from the "Five- Minute Attack Plan: Bathroom" to the all-out assault of spring cleaning (it really does make a big difference), from mold to stains to picking-up-after-the-kids-without-driving-yourself-crazy,this is the comprehensive crash course. Here's how to do the laundry without dulling colors. Stock the pantry to make weekday meals infinitely easier. How to get mildew off the shower tiles. How to make a bed-in one minute. How to be best friends with baking soda-just one of the many tips the author gives for saving money. And what you can do in thirty minutes to make your house completely presentable for your mother-in-law. Sorry, no more excuses.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Remember Mr. Mom?	p. viii
A Man Around the House: Getting Psyched Up	p. 1
Dad in Charge: Kitchen Setup	p. 15
Dad Does Dinner: Fast Food	p. 25
Dad Cleans Up His Act: Kitchen Patrol	p. 45
The Super Bowl: Scrubbing the Bathroom	p. 63
Dad's Own Laundromat: No More Pink T-shirts, Undies, or Briefs	p. 77
The Comfort Zone: Family Rooms	p. 99
Sleep Tight: Chaos-Free Bedrooms	p. 115
A Working Retreat: Home Office Management	p. 131
Dad's Domain: Attics, Basements, and Garages	p. 149
Blowing Out the Cobwebs: Spring Cleaning	p. 163
The 30-Minute Pre-In-law Assault on Dirt Program	p. 180
Appendix
Dad's Guide to Getting Help	p. 185
Behind Closed Drawers	p. 187
Index	p. 192
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Getting Psyched Up My father never changed a diaper in his life, but he cooked nearly every meal I ate at home. My father-in-law, on other hand, who rarely set foot in the kitchen unless a meal was already on the table, considered the laundry and vacuuming his personal province. In that generation, men helped out when and if they felt like it. It was a bonus if they did chip in and not expected if they didn't. These days things are a little different. It's more common than not that both parents work outside the home, and it's a toss-up who's home early enough to put on the dinner or first in the door to hear that a sports uniform needs to be washed for the next day's game. Were you a polished hitter the first time you picked up a baseball bat? Not likely. Being in charge of a home takes a little practice, too. In this chapter, we'll get you started on thinking like a housekeeping Dad; after that, we'll move through the tasks in your home and show you how to get maximum results from minimal effort. Can't We All Just Get Along? Do you and your wife fight about housework-and do you do it more often now that you have kids? A national survey by the Soap and Detergent Association found that 55 percent of couples with children regularly argue about housework, whereas only one-third of childless couples said it's a point of contention. One of the reasons for this is that kids, especially when they're preschool age, are exhausting, and small problems, like the dirty socks you left in the family room, can escalate to near-divorce-worthy issues when people are tired. But you can't blame the kids for all the cleaning strife in the family. Even when it was just you and your wife, you did things that might set her off (see page 4). Women have been in charge of running the house for so long that a lot of them are kind of set in their ways. They think a job isn't finished if it hasn't been done the way they would have done it.Take the kitchen, for example. My wife used to look in the door as I put away the last supper dish and say something like, " I thought you were going to clean the kitchen." It took a lot of bickering before I finally realized that, in our minds, we were looking at two entirely different rooms. If I had put away the leftover food and done the dishes, as far as I was concerned, the kitchen was finished for the night. My wife's idea of a "finished" kitchen entailed having every counter gleaming, the floor swept, any obvious spots mopped up (at least wiped with a damp paper towel), the dishtowels hung-neatly. And once that was done, she'd probably undertake some other project, like throwing away those pears I meant to toss last week and washing the fruit bowl. But she doesn't clean the kitchen most nights. I do. Very quickly, it became clear that we needed to talk out how things were going to be done around here. Managing Expectations Just like anything else in your marriage, it all comes down to communicating points of view and negotiating: If your wife doesn't expect the scent of a freshly mopped floor when she sticks her head in the kitchen door after dinner . . . well, then she won't be disappointed. However, it's not just her expectations that needed to be managed. I was one of those clueless dads who said that we weren't going to fill our home with every battery-operated, primary-color plastic toy in existence. (So of course my living room is a wonderland of Day-Glo.) I swore that I'd have my kids put their stuff into the toy box every evening so that we could walk on carpet, not a minefield of sharp-edged plastic. Ha! Thank goodness I have tough-skinned feet. #8220