Paula Jhung hates cleaning, but she loves clean.
Clean is order, she said. Clean is calm. Clean is being able to cook dinner without having to move a pile of mail and newspapers out of the way first.
But clean can be a lot of work, too. So Jhung, an interior designer and admitted housework avoider, has figured out ways to achieve an ordered state with a minimum of exertion.
Those techniques are at the heart of her decorating consulting service, Clean Design in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif. They’re also a focus of her new book, “Cleaning and the Meaning of Life: Simple Solutions to Declutter Your Home and Beautify Your Life.”
Even though Jhung doesn’t enjoy the work involved in cleaning and organizing, she believes the resulting peace of mind makes the effort worthwhile. “I find if your surroundings are a muddled mess, your mind is, too. There’s a stress-mess connection,” she said in a phone interview.
‘Too much stuff’
Central to managing that mess, she said, is dealing with the clutter. That’s easier to do if you weed out the excess and reduce what comes into your home in the first place.
Jhung thinks too many of us suffer from what she calls “too much stuff syndrome,” or TMS. It causes crankiness and bloating, she joked, but it affects men, women and children alike.
One of the principal causes of TMS, she said, is recreational shopping.
Pare down possessions
To get out of the recreational shopping habit, Jhung recommended writing down the things you think you need, then letting the list sit awhile. In the meantime, you might rediscover a forgotten item on a shelf or in a closet that will work just fine. Or maybe you’ll decide you don’t really need the thing after all. Jhung said she once determined she needed a rug for a hallway, then realized later that the rug would be just one more thing to vacuum, and the hall looked fine without it.
Watching less TV can also curb the urge to shop, she notes in her book. You’ll be exposed to less temptation.
You can’t pare every possession from your life, of course. So for the things you do need for decorating and outfitting your house, Jhung advocates thinking low-maintenance.
Use color as camouflage
Decorate eating areas in what she calls the “four major food group colors” – red, green, tan, a little yellow and a bit of white or cream, preferably combined in prints. An Oriental rug in those colors under the dining room table is going to hide a lot of sins and buy you time between cleanings, she said. She’s even been known to use fabric pens to color over stains – or, as she put it, “add to the design.”
Use earth tones for carpeting or flooring near doorways, she suggested. Rich brown wood flooring with a lot of grain, for example, will mask much of the tracked-in dirt, Jhung said.
Add a white wash to that floor, and you’ll help hide the dust, she said. She once used that strategy on a client’s wood ceiling, because she knew that surface would be difficult to dust frequently.
You can also camouflage dust by choosing matte finishes and dusty colors, such as sage green and Wedgwood blue, she writes. Or treat surfaces so dust doesn’t stick easily: Paint windowsills with high-gloss enamel, wax wood surfaces periodically with paste wax and seal the garage floor with a clear concrete sealer or a colored epoxy. Leather upholstery, glass doors and hard-surface flooring are good dust deflectors, too.
Pet owners know how omnipresent animal hair can be, so that’s another good candidate for camouflage. Using animal-print fabrics to cover a pet’s favorite spot is a great tactic, Jhung said. Animal prints are not only popular, she said, but they’re neutral, so they blend with most decorating schemes, and they typically have brown, black and gray in them – the colors found in most cat and dog breeds.
It’s not necessary to have your favorite reading chair reupholstered in leopard print, however. Just get a big piece of fabric to toss over Spot’s favorite napping place, then remove it when company comes, she said.
Lower your standards
Jhung’s housekeeping pointers also include one that involves getting your psyche in order: Let go of perfectionism. “We can drive ourselves crazy trying to live up to a House Beautiful standard,” she said.
Perfectionism can also lead to procrastination, Jhung said. We don’t tackle organizing the closet, for example, because we don’t have the right containers or hangers, or we don’t have a block of time to get the whole job done.
So trade your perfectly polished coffee table for one with a distressed finish, so you don’t break out in a sweat every time your kids put their feet up on it. Embrace the patina of worn wood and sun-faded fabrics. Give up the need to tackle a job like cleaning the basement in one marathon session, and instead set the timer to work in 30-minute chunks over a number of days – and give yourself permission to stop when time is up.
The whole point of a clean house, after all, is to reduce your stress. You don’t want to create stress by setting impossible standards. Or, for that matter, by doing anymore housework than you have to.
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