Asklemmy

Plot the downfall of the bourgeoisie.

Hijacking your thread to advocate for my lazy ideology. Disclaimer I have pretty severe ADHD so this might be extreme for most people but for me this makes life liveable.

Forget trying to make things look super tidy and neat like in an IKEA commercial. Make your living space functional, comfortable and easy to maintain. Reduce the amount of physical, mental and emotional effort required to maintain your environment. For example, for laundry:

1. Don’t iron anything unless you really need/want to. (Job interview, going on a date, appearing in court, etc.)
2. Anywhere you’re liable to undress, have a basket for dirty clothes. It should be open-topped (no lid!) and mobile, like a laundry basket, so when you need to do a load of laundry, you can pick up and use the whole basket - functioning both as the hamper and the basket. Bedroom and bathroom are the usual places for this! You want the act of tossing dirty clothes in the laundry to be just as easy as tossing it on the floor.
3. There’s no such thing as odd socks. They’re called mix ‘n’ match socks now. Like Mashems!
4. No neatly folded clothes or hangers or anything like that, except for very special things such as in point 1 - everything just gets dumped into big drawers based on category. I have little fabric boxes that fit into a kallax to keep this relatively neat looking but super easy.
5. If something can’t survive going in the washing machine mixed load cycle and the tumble dryer daily load, it is not welcome in my life. (There’s a similar rule about the dishwasher!)

You get the idea. Embrace your laziness, don't bother yourself with half a second what people might think of how you live. This is surprisingly neat and orderly and takes almost no effort to maintain. If you keep finding your basket is misplaced, buy another basket and keep it in two places. Stop fighting the current and go with your flow. Accept who you are, even if you’re a lazy bitch like me!

Wash their sheets and pillow cases. Also vacuum. Dust mites are not healthy to have around.

Exercise their water valves. Crawl under the kitchen sink and the bathroom sink, reach around behind the toilet, find the hot and cold valves behind the washing machine. Especially if you live in a hard water area as I do, in Southern California. I have it on my calendar to do it twice a year. If I don't, the valves will eventually become calcified and ossified and worthless. I say this based on hard experience.

Wash the sheets

Going over the counter with a swab and some random household spray soap. I think some people have the great habit to always keep the kitching clean, but we don't, and I've noticed that when you really try to keep it clean it not only looks so much fucking more calm and not like a mind-pulling warzone of stuff to do, but I also noticed less (fruit)flies, which, now that i'm writing it, makes our kitchen sound fucking disgusting.

Clean the filter in your dishwasher once every month or two, depending on how often you use it.

Check the air pressure in your tires. Seems like nobody does this these days.

Clean the microwave and oven. People have some filthy microwaves(mine included).

Clean the touchable surfaces on your devices and device keyboards.

Blow out the dryer duct.

Not technically a chore, but a chore preventer: Close the lid before flushing the toilet.

I run an Airbnb hosting in a room on my house for like 3 years and I’m still amazed by how little people actually did it. Even after we sat a signal asking for it just above the flush button. Having feces particles all around your brushes, toothbrushes, towels, etc is an image nobody has but myself it seems.

As someone with a German shepherd, vacuum the carpets. You can never get that pet hair out enough, and just when you think you're done there's more! I can feel it pleasing my sinuses every time I vacuum

Change your air filters regularly

Flush your water heater once a year.

I know that I'm guilty of not doing this regularly, my dad, a former pipeftter and practically a living parody of the responsible homeowner dad who drove us all crazy with preventative maintenance routines doesn't even do it regularly.

But it's really not hard, I'm not going to write a guide here because if you just punch "how to flush a water heater" into your search engine of choice you'll get plenty of good results.

It'll improve the lifespan and efficiency of your water heater and decrease how much sediment and such you have in your hot water.

Also when you get a new water heater, replace the shitty plastic valve they all seem to ship with these days with a proper brass valve, it's like a $10 part from home Depot and takes about a minute to swap them out. They probably use them because they know no one actually flushes their water heater anyway, but if you're one of the few of us who do, you know how sketchy the plastic ones are, if you touch them more than about 2 or 3 times you feel like you're going to break them.

How truly necessary it is will depend a lot on the quality of your water, if you have good, clean, soft water, it may not make a noticeable difference, if you have harder, dirtier water it might buy you a couple extra years with your water heater, and if your water quality is especially bad you may want to do it a couple of times a year. It takes a little bit for the tank to drain, fill back up and get to temperature, but it's less than 10 minutes of actual hands-on work, and you can go do whatever the hell you want in the meantime as long as it doesn't involve hot water.

You should also check and may need to replace the anode rod every few years, that can also increase the lifespan of your water heater. You're probably going to need a beefy impact wrench though, they often really don't like to come free.

Clean under/behind appliances.

Don't know for other people but I should definitely clean my windows more often. I think I'll do that today.

Yes, power drills can clean bathtubs and toilets. Just use different brushes.

Clean the shower drain. You can also get little nets for catching hair under the grate, at least for the ones usually found in my country. It's surprising how much hair ends up there.

Checking on your neighbors.

Basically all of them, ugh.

Cleaning out the billionaires from behind the curtains