Home Ec
But why should I care about housekeeping?
Major Books
- How To Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis, LPC - is it really all that and a bag of chips? Pretty close. It's got some truly excellent advice, particularly for not being unnecessarily hard on yourself, and especially for people who might struggle with household tasks due to mental overload or a lot of IRL stress (external and/or mental). It doesn't have many tips for keeping house with physical disability so keep that in mind if that's what you're needing.
- Clean Like A Man by Tom McNulty
- My House is Killing Me! by Jeffrey C. May and Connie L. May
- Superman's Not Coming by Erin Brockovich
- The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer-Becker
- Adulting by Kelly Williams Brown
- Home Comforts by Cheryl Mendelson
- Home Safe Home by Debra Lynn Dadd
- Laundry Love by Patric Richardson and Karin B. Miller
- The Everygirl's Guide to Life by Maria Menounos
- Organizing from the Inside Out for Teens by Morgenstern
- Clean Your Space by Melissa Maker
- 12/30/22 500 Ideas For Small Spaces by Kimberley Seldon - Contains some legitimately helpful tips and ideas that would really have helped if I'd found 'em like ten years ago prior to living in a variety of really small pigeonholes :)
Still Reading These
- Stuff by Peg Bracken. The I Hate To Cook Book, The I Hate To Cook Almanack, and The I Hate to Housekeep Book. It's obvious how much she hates all this but damn is she ever good at it. I'm kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop and for something in one of these books to leap out and grab me by the throat like "casual" racism or some other product of its time, like it did with that one book of holidays by Alice Morse Earle. Hoping not. So far so good, fingers crossed. 10/28/22 OK, all done with a few. Have now finished The I Hate To Cook Book, The I Hate To Cook Almanack, and The I Hate To Housekeep Book. I recommend them all. They are definitely a product of their time, so keep that in mind as you read them. The only thing that really threw me was October 10 in the Almanack, which I researched and discovered it did not at all say what it seemed to...
- The Folding Lady by Sophie Liard - yes, I too would like to fold my clothing as seen in fancy department stores, please and thank you. There is some The Secret type New Age stuff, but a lot of it is good wisdom despite the name-dropping of that irritating Positive Thinking crap.
Please also see Helpful Books since that contains most of the relevant information here but in a more condensed, more useful form. Simple Lifehacks also has a lot of stuff that can help.
Links
General Adulting
- Ranker Tips and Ranker How-To Added 6/13/23 The issue with Reddit, as you've probably noticed, is the difficulty in sorting through the shlock to find the useful information. The writers at Ranker did exactly that and as a result this might just be the most helpful website on the Internet.
- Bob Vila A lot of very helpful information for how to keep a home or apartment safe and comfortable, not to mention other home repair and upgrades type stuff. Lots of it. And you don't have to dig through endless articles to find immediately helpful info either
- Family Handyman Listicles Surprisingly interesting as well as helpful.
- Learn How To Adult Youtube channel
- Dad, How Do I? Youtube channel
- Mom, How Do I? Youtube channel
- Pet MD Because the vast array of information needed to properly take care of a pet is far higher than what social norms dictate. For instance, pets need vaccinations and often tooth cleaning regularly too, did you know that?
- The Spruce Pets More information for caring for pets.
- The Spruce Takes digging to get to the good articles, much like Buzzfeed in fact, but it has a whole lot of them. For more involved stuff, most notably the home improvement stuff, that could be dangerous, it's probably best not to trust it.
- Buzzfeed Surprisingly, quite a few of these articles are very useful for learning things like lifehacks. The trick is learning to browse the site by using the recommended articles you see at the bottom of the page after you click on some inane clickbait article.
- SomethingAwful Do NOT buy a subscription, the site was owned by a serial abuser in relationships and is now moderated by some cancel culture-y toxic jerks who certainly didn't not enable said abuser, and much of the SA users regretfully donated a lot of money to RAINN to atone for buying a membership. This is one of the armpits of the internet and rarely fails to live up to its name. It is also a major bastion of Gen X people who have a lot more life experience than most, a lot more education than most, and a lot more snark than most. Particularly helpful for relationship tips, especially with respects to families and parenting. Worth reading. I never come away from a lurk session without having learned something important.
- Ebaums World Years ago, you could learn useful things on SomethingAwful, Cracked, or even 4chan. Nowadays both the far right and the far left are doing their best to censor everything they don't like, and the only thing left is echo chambers like Reddit. Even 4chan has become a far right echo chamber; while SomethingAwful descended into drama and mediocrity. Most of the rest of the internet is clickbait designed to earn advertising income via clicks and selling your browsing habit info. Well, ebaumsworld has come far from its meme stealing days and now it is actually informative. I kid you not.
- r/Askreddit Popular threads often clarify issues that no one really understands that well. Worth frequenting.
Relationships Are Hard
- The saying "you can't pour from an empty cup" is very true; here are some Mental Health Tips
- Bear in mind that neurodiversity is often invisible. Someone you are friends with, family with, or in a relationship with may have at least one mental health condition that has not been diagnosed, and this could potentially hurt you both. In fact, it is likely you may have some kind of mental condition as well even if it is mild enough to have symptoms that aren't very noticeable - heck, you could have developed one just from living through 2020. It's not something to be ashamed of and it is very normal. Learn about some mental health conditions here, or preferably in the Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, mental health chapter. I wouldn't have recommended this if the mental health crisis in this country wasn't so prevalent, and therapy so hard to attain for most people.
- Bad Relationship Habits
- Beware of relationship stereotypes. For some reason peer pressure is even more intense when it comes to relationships than it is for drugs, even. For instance: the "soul mate," the rom-com cliches, the "you must date or lose your virginity by 30," the "look a certain way to get you a man," the "you're a failure if you're not strapped to The Perfect Person for life" and so on and so forth. It seems like movies, TV shows, fairy tales and a whole lot of culture brainwashes you into believing that relationships should or must be a certain way. Don't just blindly accept this social conditioning. Think about it.
- Wisdom and Life Advice This has a relationships advice section. It might be worthless, or maybe not.
Other Stuff
Apartment "Delights"
DIY Everything
- MakerSpace Classes: there are a lot here, and they can save you a lot of money, time, and effort. Normally you would pay for lessons like these at a trade school but here they are, for free. Instructables Classes
- Make just about anything you want Instructables
- Homesteading
- The Spruce Gardening Has a lot of handy tips for just about every gardening topic there is
- Carpentry
- Wood Magazine Has DIY tips for woodworking to take your skills from zero on up
- Welding
- Basket Weaving
- Soapmaking
- Candlemaking
- Makeup and Skincare Product Creation
- Spiffing up your home, organizing, and doing minor remodeling How To Nest For Less
- Perfumery
- Papermaking
- Making Ink and Pens - Back to Basics by Abigail Gehring
- Dyeing
- Pottery
- Glassworks
- Blacksmithing
- Making Art Supplies - The Organic Artist: Make Your Own Paint, Paper, Pigments and Prints from Nature by Nick Neddo
- Making Art
- Machine Shop Work
- Leatherworking
- Automation and Robotics
- Household Substances
- Household Chemicals
- Herbal or Natural Crafts
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