Home Comforts: One of My Favorite Homemaking Books

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I’ve read so many books about homemaking. Some notable ones are “The Hidden Art of Homemaking,” “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” “Sidetracked Home Executives,” “How to Keep House While Drowning,” and more. Even in fiction, I enjoy novels or movies that show and romanticize homemaking, such as the “Little House on the Prairie” series, “Marcia Schyuler,” “Re-Creations,” “My Neighbor Totoro,” “Hannah Coulter,” “Practical Magic,” and more. High on this list of homemaking books is “Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House,” by Cheryl Mendelson, which I first read over a dozen years ago.

Now, I don’t love everything about this book. It’s an absolute tome: a 900+ page encyclopedia about how to clean and maintain just about everything. I haven’t read it cover to cover, but I have read a lot of it. Mendelson goes into extreme detail about how to clean and maintain everything a home might contain. She discusses different philosophical approaches to housekeeping, and reminisces about how her grandmothers kept house, how she neglected her home as a young adult, and how she came around to loving the job of housekeeping. And she does it all with a warm, practical writing style, with touches of nostalgia. A lot of my housekeeping habits come from this book, honestly, because her tone is so inspiring. But I don’t do all of the things in it (is that even possible?)

Here are some favorite quotes:

“…the way you experience life in your home is determined by how you do your housekeeping….little cosmetic habits are what give everybody’s home the special qualities that make it their own and let them feel at home there. This sense of being at home is important to everyone’s well-being. If you do not get enough of it, your happiness, resilience, energy, humor, and courage will decrease.”

“What really does work to increase the feeling of having a home and its comforts is housekeeping. Housekeeping creates cleanliness, order, regularity, beauty, the conditions for health and safety, and a good place to do and feel all the things you wish and need to do and feel in your home….it is your housekeeping that makes your home alive, that turns it into a small society in its own right, a vital place with its own ways and rhythms, the place where you can be more yourself than you can be anywhere else.”

Making Home Comfortable For Everyone

All of these quotes are very individualistic, about you feeling comfortable in your home. But of course most people share a home with other people. Mendelson writes this book from the point of view of one person doing the housework. In my household, I have always been the primary “housekeeper” because I have been a stay-at-home mom for so many years, and also because I enjoy learning housekeeping and home management tasks. But my husband and I both think it’s important that all members of the household learn and participate in the basic tasks that are required to manage a home and keep it tidy. It’s just basic life stuff that everyone should know how to do.

Mendelson points out in her book that people have different opinions on housekeeping and how it should be done. Her two grandmothers kept house very differently, and both sneered at the other’s way of doing it. In a household of many people, these different opinions can be tricky to manage. It’s important to remember that there are some fundamental housekeeping tasks required to keep things healthy and safe. For example, taking out the garbage regularly, and washing dishes. And then there are preferences that aren’t as essential to our health, such as folding laundry and washing windows.

When teaching my kids how to clean, I tend to focus on the basics required to keep us healthy. They all are learning to wash dishes, wipe counters, sweep and mop, take out the trash, scrub the toilets, vacuum, dust fans and furniture, do their own laundry, and put away the things they got out at the end of the day. Are they perfect at it? No. Neither am I, to be honest, but we are pretty good at it most of the time. These are the basic cleaning tasks I would consider to be important for our health.

Everything else, such as folding laundry in a certain way, hanging laundry to dry instead of using the dryer, keeping the windows sparkling clean, or the porch cobweb free, or wiping the soles of our shoes with a damp cloth (Marie Kondo does this) might be nice to do, but it really depends on the people in the house. If those things make the home more comfortable for the people in the home, they might be worthwhile. But if insisting that those things get done creates a lot of tension in the home, they might not be worthwhile. We want peace in the home, not tension.

Feeling Comfortable at Home

From a young age, I’ve been interested in homemaking. I’m not a neat freak or a super methodical person, but I am an introvert who loves life at home. Home and my environment matter deeply to me. Home is where I feel the most at peace in the world. Home is where I can be myself, and see myself expressed in the way I decorate and tend to my home.

Homemade Laundry Detergent Recipe

My husband and I have been making this very easy laundry detergent for years. It works great and it’s cheap (at least half the price per load of regular detergent, such as Tide powder.) One of my favorite things about it is that I don’t have to lug around huge jugs of detergent, ever. Just a cute mason jar and some small boxes of ingredients. Check out the recipe below.

Ingredients

1 cup grated soap. You can use Fel’s Naptha laundry soap, Castille soap, or any basic bar soap. One bar of Fel’s Naptha soap will make roughly one cup of grated soap.
2 cups borax
2 cups washing soda

Instructions

1. To grate the soap, use a cheese grater or food processor.
2. Mix all the ingredients together in a half gallon mason jar and you’re done!
3. Use about 2 Tablespoons per large washer load.

Questions and answers:

Can I use homemade laundry detergent in an HE washer? I don’t have one myself, but many people online say that they use similar homemade detergent powder in their HE washers with good results. I suggest doing your own research for your specific machine.

Can I use homemade laundry detergent with cold water? Yes! I almost always use cold water. Admittedly, soap works better in warm or hot water. Occasionally a little bit of soap will not dissolve, and will leave a white smudge on dark clothing. You can do an extra rinse cycle to avoid this, or, just rinse off the smudge in the sink.

Can I add essential oils to this laundry detergent? No. Since this is a powdered detergent, essential oils may cause clumping.