Life After Mother: Keep to a Schedule

My mother’s home that I inherited was built for a family, not a senior. With three bedrooms, two baths, a front and back yard, and a garage, it’s a heavy burden for one person who’s into the golden years to maintain. At the same time it’s so full of the accumulations of multiple lifetimes, I’m tempted to add a room just to house the extra furniture.

Any goal needs a schedule, and over the past three years I’ve developed a weekly and monthly schedule to keep the property clean and maintained. Mondays are for laundry and groceries, Tuesdays for shopping and errands—the drugstore, bookstore, hardware store, library, bank, credit union, repair shop. Sundays are my own personal down time, the time to manage my senior-years health, obeying my need to rest up from the last six days and get ready to tackle the next six. Every month, twelve days—working out to three weeks–are set aside for home cleaning and
maintenance. My mornings are usually spent on home-office work, and afternoons on housekeeping. Cleaning the living room and the kitchen each requires an afternoon every month. Another four days are blocked for cleaning and similar projects involving the three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Dusting the blinds only takes about half an hour but I schedule it separately from other chores.

Three more days are allotted for outside-the-house chores. Taking care of my car—washing it, checking its oil and air—rarely takes an entire afternoon but gets its own slot on my monthly schedule. The yard I regret I can only give one day a month, as most of the grass has died, weeds proliferate, and efforts at planting have failed. I have a gardener but he’s just a blow-and-mow guy, and not a very dependable one. I keep telling myself I should fire him but I’ve never been able to bring myself to do it.

When I moved in and looked at the garage, I guessed organizing it would take a year. Three years have passed and there’s still no end in sight. I’m hoping to get to the point where I can just sweep it out and keep it from getting too dirty or cluttered every few months, but that time is still at least a year away.

I give two days per month to never-ending projects that I’d like to spend more time on but can’t, at least not yet—the stamp collection, scrapbooking, family photos, genealogy, crafting. That leaves one week per month, or sometimes two, for free time, except there’s no free time. It’s time to do any chore or project or errand that doesn’t fit the rest of the schedule.

My eventual goal is to downsize enough to that I can downsize into a smaller house in a more affordable area of the country, but right now I’m just plodding through my scheduled maintenance and hoping the future brings more ease and comfort to my sunset years.