Clean, Sweet and Fresh

The rooms where we sleep should be kept immaculately clean, sweet and fresh at all times.

Here again, a well-trained family can help with the care. If each one... puts away personal possessions... the sum total of saved time really amounts to something for the homemaker or servant.

See the problem here is that I do more than sleep in my bedroom. As one of only three rooms in my apartment, it gets a ton of use! If I had a whole house to live in, my possessions might end up a little more evenly spread around. What I've been noticing in the last few days is that when the room is neat to begin with and I put one thing down out of place, it's jarring - keeps on jumping out at me, so to speak. I just have to pick it up and dispose of it and send it along to its proper home.

Even the most immaculate '40s housewife who only slept in her bedroom would have had to do some straightening up in the morning. There would have been books and magazines, ashtrays or pipes, empty water glasses - the kinds of things people typically leave on their nightstands as they turn out the lamp and settle in for a good night's sleep. If a woman had to spend the next couple of hours making breakfast and getting the family off to school and work, she would have appreciated being able to leave her bedroom in decent shape until she could return to it with her full attention...

Now, my 1945 manual instructs me to do that very thing. Each and every morning after cleaning up after breakfast and cleaning the living room, the '40s housekeeper was supposed to give every one of the bedrooms its daily once over. And then on Thursdays - in the late morning or early afternoon - she was scheduled to give the bedrooms a thorough weekly cleaning. That scenario's obviously a fantasy for this working girl, so I'm going to give the bedroom just a thorough weekly cleaning on Thursday evenings. I'll have to be sure that the daily work assigned for bedrooms is being covered on those Thursday evenings, too.