The ultimate guide for the housekeeping-impaired! Bestselling author Mindy Starns Clark delves into the reasons behind chronic messiness and helps you find the permanent solution you've been looking for. Using “horizontal thinking,” Mindy will teach you how to set up your home so efficiently and logically that it seems to clean itself. Learn... how to keep the house twice as clean in half the time how a stepladder, a camera, and a stopwatch will help you get started how to change a messy area into a tidy one—permanently how to anticipate and prevent messes before they happen how to get the family on board in this new process Also included are tips, strategies, and ideas from hundreds of her readers. More than a how-to book, The House That Cleans Itself looks at what God has to say about cleanliness and order, and how He can inspire order in your life in a fresh and unique way.
A classic bestselling resource for every household, Home Comforts helps you manage everyday chores, find creative solutions to domestic dilemmas, and enhance the experience of life at home. “Home Comforts is to the house what Joy of Cooking is to food.” —USA TODAY Home Comforts is an engaging and comprehensive book about housekeeping. It is a lively and readable guide for both beginners and experts in all the domestic arts. From keeping surfaces free of germs, watering plants, removing stains, folding a fitted sheet, cleaning china, tuning a piano, lighting a fire, setting the dining room table—this guide covers everything that people might want to do for themselves in their homes. Further topics include: making up a bed with hospital corners, expert recommendations for safe food storage, reading care labels (and sometimes carefully disregarding them), keeping your home free of dust mites and other allergens, this is a practical, good-humored, philosophical guidebook to the art and science of household management.
*The basis for the wonderfully funny and moving TV series developed by Amy Poehler and Scout Productions* A charming, practical, and unsentimental approach to putting a home in order while reflecting on the tiny joys that make up a long life. In Sweden there is a kind of decluttering called döstädning, dö meaning “death” and städning meaning “cleaning.” This surprising and invigorating process of clearing out unnecessary belongings can be undertaken at any age or life stage but should be done sooner than later, before others have to do it for you. In The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, artist Margareta Magnusson, with Scandinavian humor and wisdom, instructs readers to embrace minimalism. Her radical and joyous method for putting things in order helps families broach sensitive conversations, and makes the process uplifting rather than overwhelming. Margareta suggests which possessions you can easily get rid of (unworn clothes, unwanted presents, more plates than you’d ever use) and which you might want to keep (photographs, love letters, a few of your children’s art projects). Digging into her late husband’s tool shed, and her own secret drawer of vices, Margareta introduces an element of fun to a potentially daunting task. Along the way readers get a glimpse into her life in Sweden, and also become more comfortable with the idea of letting go.
For all those who choose to live "imperfectly" with the messy things they love, this book shows how to do so creatively, happily, and with considerable style ideas from leading designers. A beautiful and inspiring volume, A Perfectly Kept House is the Sign of A Misspent Life focuses on living well with everything that makes a house a home. If you have been influenced by the picturesquely cluttered studios of Pablo Picasso or Alexander Calder, or by the art- and book-filled house of Vanessa Bell, this unique style book will stimulate you with its creative ideas.This volume explores how real-life tastemakers (photographers, textile designers, fashion designers, writers, artists) integrate their life and interiors to live well with their passions, histories, conveniences, and inconveniences. In inspiring essays, Mary Randolph Carter muses on such key housekeeping concerns as clutter versus mess; open windows; and unmade beds. Combining practical tips with liberating philosophy—"Don’t scrub the soul out of your home"; "Make room for what you love"—this volume celebrates living beautifully and happily, not messily. Lavishly illustrated with intimate photographs of different living spaces, Carter exalts in the beauty of imperfection and in living perfectly in our "imperfect" homes. Life isn’t perfect—why should your house be?
If you're tired of staring at the same mess every day, but struggling to find the time and willpower to clean it, you probably have a very good reason: anxiety, fatigue, depression, ADHD, or lack of support. Designed by therapist KC Davis, this revolutionary method of cleaning and organizing helps end the stress-mess cycle. After KC Davis gave birth to her second child, she didn't fold a single piece of laundry for seven months. Between postpartum depression and ADHD, she felt numb and overwhelmed. She regained her sanity--and the functionality of her home--after one life-changing realization: You don't work for your home; your home works for you. In other words, messiness is not a moral failing. A new sense of calm washed over her as she let go of the shame-based messaging that interpreted a pile of dirty laundry as "I can never keep up" and a chaotic kitchen as "I'm a bad mother." Instead, she looked at unwashed clothes and thought, "I am alive," and at stacks of dishes and thought, "I cooked my family dinner three nights in a row." Building on this foundation of self-compassion, KC devised the powerful practical approach that has exploded in popularity through her TikTok account, @domesticblisters. The secret is to stop following perfectionist rules that don't make sense for you--like folding clothes that don't wrinkle anyway, or thinking that every room has to be clean at the same time--and to find creative solutions that accommodate your needs, pet peeves, daily rhythms, and attention span. Inside, you'll learn exactly how to customize your approach and rebuild your relationship with your home, including: -How to stop seeing care tasks as a reflection of your worth, but rather as kindnesses to your future self -How to use calming rituals to keep you from feeling overwhelmed when you look at a big mess -How to stagger tasks that are easy to procrastinate throughout the week and month -How to quickly transform a room from messy to fully functional through the "5 Things" tidying method, and other shortcuts requiring minimal energy Read this book to make home feel like a sanctuary again: where you can move with ease, where guilt, self-criticism, and endless checklists have no place, and where you always have permission to rest, even when things aren't finished.
Having won the National Book Award for How We Die, his best-selling inquiry into the causes and modes of death, Sherwin Nuland now turns his attention to the miraculous resiliency of human life. For this lucid, wonderful, and wonder-filled new book explores the body's mysterious capacity to marshal disparate organs and processes in the interests of survival. Like its predecessor, How We Live is filled with gripping medical case histories: a woman is pulled back from the brink of death from inexplicable internal bleeding; another patient triumphs over breast cancer; the "routine" removal of a polyp triggers a nearly lethal medical crisis. For Nuland, each of these cases serves to illustrate the extraordinary responsiveness and adaptability of the human organism. We learn how the aorta's baroreceptors monitor blood pressure and respond to its minutest fluctuations. We follow the intricate chain of electrochemical command that makes us leap out of the path of a speeding car. We discover why the stomach—which is capable of breaking down everything from porridge to pizza—refrains from digesting itself. Informed by sympathy for human suffering and an erudition that includes poetry and the Talmud as well as the medical canon, How We Live is science writing of the rarest kind—lucid, poetic, and genuinely uplifting.
Now in its fifth edition, Professional Management of Housekeeping Operations is the essential practical introduction to the field, a complete course ranging from key principles of management to budgeting, from staff scheduling to cleaning. With expanded attention to leadership and training, budgeting and cost control, and the increasingly vital responsibility for environmentally safe cleaning, the latest edition of this industry standard also includes new case studies that help readers grasp concepts in a real-world setting. Instructor's Manual, Test Bank in both Word and Respondus formats, Photographs from the text, and PowerPoint Slides are available for download at www.wiley.com/college
