Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers were totally in control of their households. This is something that even stay at home mothers today don’t often have. It seems as if the homes of Aunt Bea and June Cleaver were just illusions created by Hollywood. But were they really? Are clean, organized home with little stress an illusion never to be obtained in real life? Or, was there a secret that real homemakers of times past used to run a smooth home? Well, enough questions and let’s get on with the answers. There really was a secret called a homemaker’s binder, control journal, or home journal depending on the writer. Whatever it is called many women are discovering this lost art of household management and finding that real life homes can look like those of the 1950s sitcoms.
What exactly is a homemaker’s binder? It is a binder or notebook that organizes your schedule and home by dividing it into sections. It keeps all of your lists in one easy to find place. Your days are organized and because of this, tranquility is allowed back into your home and life. A homemaker’s binder takes every aspect of keeping your home and your life and organizes it into easy to manage bites. This frees up your time so that you can get to those hobbies that you have been putting off.
One of the leading websites for home organization, www.flylady.com, has this to say of the HB, ” I want you to realize that a control journal is just a place to put your routine, basic weekly plan, your zones and other information. With a control journal you have a place to keep important items without them getting lost in your numerous hot spots.” Flylady divides our homes into zones. Each zone is a room or a couple of rooms which see super deep cleaning one week out of the month. She defines hot spots as those areas of the house that tend to collect clutter; mine being the dining room table and bookshelf in the playroom. I highly recommend this website for anyone serious about gaining and maintaining control of their homes.
As stated before, a homemaker’s binder is divided into sections. While there are many suggestions for these sections you should tailor them to what works best for you. Candy from www.KeepingTheHome.com suggests the following sections: schedules, menus, cleaning, school, children, budget, recipes, contacts, other. You can and should tweak these sections to fit your life. Being a freelance writer, I have a section for article ideas and magazine proposals. To get started this website would be a good source to check out other homemaking binders from several different sources.
Many women wonder why they should use a homemaker’s journal. How could such a simple idea free them from the stress of trying to organize a busy life and home? A homemaking binder does its job by forcing the user to develop habits and routines. It takes 21 days to form a habit. Once these habits are established then they are performed with little effort. Many of us currently use the hit and miss method of housekeeping which simply is exhausting, time consuming and ineffective. The homemaker’s binder keeps the user on task in establishing good habits and routines of home organization.
Women for years used homemaking journals to run a smooth home. Books were even written for new housewives on the establishment of routines in the home and household management. Somewhere along the line this art was lost and these last couple of generations have been left floundering in a sea of housework. Now it is being re-discovered and women everywhere are being freed from the chains of an out of control home. There are probably many women who run their homes just fine without a binder. However, for the rest of us who feel overwhelmed and out of control, a homemaker’s binder can be our ticket to sanity and tranquility.
