Live more, Clean less.

My grandma was born in 1929 and was married after the end of WWII. She and my grandpa bought their first house in 1951 and pretty much every week since then she spent her Saturday morning cleaning. But not, not like the regular kind of cleaning. I mean, she would do normal stuff, like sweep the floors, and mop the kitchen, and clean the bathrooms… But she would also literally drag every piece of furniture out of her living room and into the kitchen so she could properly vacuum the carpet.

I lived with her for a few months when I was about 10 years old and every Saturday, I would have to scramble over the chairs and coffee tables to get to the kitchen. Because, of course Grandma was up at the crack of dawn to clean. Then I would have my cereal and Grandma would drag all of the furniture back into the living room and put everything back in its place. 

And my mom is also someone who cleans every Saturday, but she doesn’t quite go to the extent of moving furniture, but she does the rest. And when I got married and we got our first house, I pretty much spent every Saturday cleaning too.

Several years later, after I got married, my grandma and I were chatting on the phone. And she probably would have been around 75 at that time and she said, “You know… I don’t have many regrets in my life… I really don’t. But if I could do it all over again, I would spend less time cleaning.” 

And I thought, “Hmm. If that’s Grandma’s biggest regret, maybe I should pay attention to that.” So I cut back on how often I cleaned. And it turns out that she had a point. I think about that piece of advice a lot and really enjoy taking Saturdays off every so often and doing something for myself. So thanks grandma for that piece of advice that you gave to us way back in the day.