What is my hobby? My hobby is House Work! Part 3

We’ve already covered a good deal of ground about being a good Surrendered hubby and getting the house all cleaned and organized. We talked about the differences between maintenance cleaning and deep cleaning. We talked about how getting the ‘dude work’ done fits in to all of this, and a few tips have been given in how to organize all of this work and make your task more efficient.

I know you are fantasizing about endless housework right now thinking “Why would I want it to be more efficient? That would mean that I am done sooner and I want to clean without ceasing! I dream of scrubbing the floors 24 hours a day on my hands and knees! – Relax there is no ‘finish’. You CAN’T finish it! No matter how hard you work and how long you work you CAN NOT FINISH IT! There is always more to do. Once you THINK that you are done there is always detailing to be done. Have you dusted BEHIND the shelves? Have you washed all the switch plates? Have you cleaned the tops of the ceiling fans and washed all the blades? Have you cleaned the top of the refrigerator?

So since you actually can never ‘finish’, I think that doing it efficiently and getting MORE done with your time should be your goal. I know you LOVE to do it and stay busy at it, but getting it cleaner faster so that you can get on to other chores is what SHE wants…

I thought that in this installment of ‘My Hobby is House Work’ I would take you through a typical weekend for me and from there maybe we can both learn something.

As I have said in earlier entries, my Queen and the center piece of my existence, is a health care professional with an advanced degree. (She has more education than I do AND she makes more money than I do. Ah the young feminist future! It’s beautiful here and I LOVE IT!) She spends at least 40 hours a week working with patients at the hospital. In order that there is no gap in coverage there over the weekends she and a few other people rotate who will work on the weekends. So she goes to work for both Saturday and Sunday once a month. (Don’t worry she takes other days off during the week on those weeks.)

This means that I have weekends with her at home and weekends without her. At first I handled these weekends very differently. I looked forward to the weekends that she worked as opportunities to really dig in and go after the house work! I think that maybe I was a little embarrassed at how “pussy whipped” this made me look to her and I avoided doing too much right in front of her even though if I did it when she was gone it would be obvious that I had because the place looked better and it looked like I put a lot of effort into it.

Our Hero! The Poster boy For The Pussy Whipped Generation!

I think that I have ‘out grown’ those worries now and she has also relaxed into the mode that “he is the one who is cleaning the house now, and I don’t really have to lift a finger so that’s really pretty cool!” I think a lot of wives who are new to this level of service and respect share that feeling of nervousness about a man being SO eager to please. I have even had it explained to me by a woman that she may feel that you are negatively judging the job that she had been doing! But nothing could be further from the truth! I think that we men are a little nervous about being seen as too eager to please too!

All I can say to you if that is your attitude or that is her attitude about it is ‘soldier on’. Just DO IT. Do the house work and do TRY to avoid making it about some kind of sexy fantasy. I mean REALLY. Do a couple of hours of house work and just be quiet about it. If you blather on about how much you have done she is probably going to get annoyed. That is like saying “See what a good boy I have been!?! See!? See!? Can we have sex now? PLEASE!!!! I’ll clean more tomorrow if we do!!!” What do you think her reaction to that might be?

An Eager To Please hubby Means A Thoroughly Pleased Lady!

Actually I bet she would laugh the first time, get that gleam in her eye (what I call "The Tigress Look") and use you! It would be fun for her and to be honest if we do it right, most women WILL get hot for a man cleaning her house. It's just that most women don’t want to see their man turn into a total sissy who is 100% engaged in a submissive sex fantasy all the time.

Learn how to chill out or this exercise in ACTUAL service to please her is going to go as wrong as all your other attempts to be dominated by a wife or girlfriend have gone in the past. Think long term. Think about the long run. Think about how actually just doing this without a lot of recognition is going to free up her time, relax her spirit (no more pressure to keep the house perfect! WHEW!) and demonstrate your willingness to both work hard to please her AND swallow your pride some and do these tasks. It’s a long term LOVE OFFERING. Treat it like that even if it will be tough at first.

If she gets openly suspicious of your motives and confronts you about them, just tell her that you love her and that you want to ‘help her’ to clean up. Tell her that she has done far too much for you already and that you just want to even up the score a little.  I wouldn’t tell her that you want to be her doormat and do all the housework now and forever more! She’ll get pretty ‘creeped out’ at the sound of that. BUT, you can say that you want to ‘help her out’ with it.

If you ‘help her out’ at first she will really enjoy it. She will not feel like she did something wrong. She will enjoy the attention. She will enjoy the lessening of her load. And she will feel like this really is being done out of love and sacrifice!

Of course once you have wormed your way into ‘helping’, it’s not all that hard to take over more and more of the tasks until basically you have ownership of almost all of them! This will take energy and consistency. DO NOT get possessive about tasks. If she beats you to a task and does it herself, thank her for ‘helping’ you now. But next time, try to anticipate what task she might try to do and do it a day or so earlier than she will!

Soon you will be well on your way to the long sought after state of being her 100% domesticated ‘male house wife’ totally dedicated to her service! She will see that you are handling it all and will simply shrug with a smile and let you. Of course once you start down this road, you will need to be consistent about it! Don’t clean the house to a T and then let all the work slide for a month until it is more chaotic and dirtier than it was before.

Oh there will be times when it is cleaner than others and there will be times when your energy will flag, but if you put in the effort and consistently work at serving her needs before she even knows what they are, you will begin to live the life you BOTH have only dreamed of!

Marital Bliss Begin With A Man On His Knees!

I will next present my actual step by step tasks in Part 4

What is my hobby? My hobby is House Work! Part 2

In my previous entry I discussed some of the early experiences I had in learning to properly serve her ladyship. I had a backlog of ‘dude chores’ that she had wanted me to do for a long time that I went through and eventually caught up while I did some of the maintenance housework as well.

I still have ‘dude chores’ to do these days but having caught up with the backlog means that I don’t have to spend so much time on them that I neglect the actual housework. Oh I still mow the lawn and trim the bushes, and yes in the spring and summer this takes some of energy away from me that I would prefer to put into cleaning the inside of the house. But, if I am truly putting in an effort on both fronts, my Queen knows it and simply enjoys watching me work for her. 

My Favorite "Norma" Rockwell Painting! Life As It SHOULD Be! Happily Domesticated Men Living To Serve And Please Their Queens!

I think that watching me wear myself completely out for her sake gives her a feeling of ‘joy of ownership’ at times. One time we went to a party at a friend of hers’ home. I had worked all day around the lawn and the house. By 10pm I literally ‘konked out’. An hour or so later she made her farewells and took me home. I apologized for having been a ‘party pooper’. She just smiled and said: “Oh it’s OK. You’ve been good. Besides I have better uses in mind for your energy.” I felt loved and well kind of ‘owned’, and it all felt good.

Worn out for the Right Reasons!

We have also reached an agreement where I am not expected to do ALL the dude work. Some household repair jobs just baffle me. Just last year she decided that we (I) should replace all of the old electrical outlets in the house. They were loose and plugs would just fall out. We were also experiencing sporadic electrical issues throughout the house at the time.

I did a couple of them and frankly I never felt comfortable doing them. I guess electrical work is one of those things that just frightens me and I realize that I am not really qualified to do this stuff.

I "COULD" do this but...

After a few weeks of “encouraging me” to get this job done I simply told her that we would both be a lot happier and the job would be done better if we just hired someone else to do it. It would be done quickly and correctly. It would cost us at most a couple hundred dollars. AND I would feel much more confident about not burning down the house later via faulty wiring.

At first she was not very happy with this idea as I suppose most wives figure that they married a man and a man should be able to fix anything! Well I probably could have done it, but I think going with a societal division of labor in this case was a wiser move.

Eventually she acquiesced in this and hired someone. The whole job was done in one day and he found faulty wiring that was causing some of our intermittent outages and fixed that too. This simple decision has led to a happier home for us. There simply are jobs that contractors are better suited for than some of us AND if we are going to pick up the slack and do all of our other jobs it is important that we males are not working 24/7 and never simply being there and being healthy and rested to please her.

All Guys Should Stay Busy Doing Our Chores In Order To Free Our Wives For Bigger More Important Things...

So right now, I do the housework. I basically took ownership of all of it. She will do some at times but I am the responsible party for that area of our lives and I am responsible that our home is neat and orderly. I keep the lawn mowed and trimmed and the bushes in shape too. I do some dude work as well, but I am not the traditional fixer upper hubby whose sole contribution and it could be a big one was to repair and maintain EVERYTHING about the house, from the water heater to the squeaky hinges on the doors.

For some of you doing those jobs is something you are really good at and you enjoy. More power to you. But for me to battle with them and use ALL my time on then (mostly because I am very inefficient at them and can afford to hire a handy man when needed) seems a poor use of the Queen’s resources.

Okay, so after explaining that you are probably wondering what do I do?

Well you should get a clue from the title of this article. I clean the house. So let’s talk about some good ways to clean the house. First off, there should be an overall strategy. We men are not trained from birth to know these things, and if you are in a service position for your Queen you do not want to constantly be asking her what to do. Nor do we have many other ‘Sweetie hubbies” to work with and learn from. Might be nice to have a House Work hubbies Association that we could all belong to, but that ain’t gonna happen.

There are two ways I have learned. The first is to do it and make mistakes and try again. The Queen can accept most mistakes especially at first. In fact as long as I didn’t ruin anything she rather enjoyed my hapless attempts! She could laugh and feel superior, then say “Look! You do it like this!” I could feel humbled and have numerous opportunities to swallow my pride as well. So for both of us it was kind of female dominant fun.

Look Silly Billy! You Need To Get ALL The Spots Off First!

But there comes a point when expectations rise and you don’t want to be fumbling about any more. You want to have a finished product that you can be proud of. And she wants a house that she doesn’t have to “Do Myself because you are so stupid!” all the time. She wants a house that is neat, orderly, and clean that she doesn’t have to do anything about INCLUDING reminding you!

Luckily, we live in the internet era. So even if there is no submissive male housework self help group in your neighborhood, there are still plenty of good resources that you can use to learn from.

Here are a few that I have learned new tricks from and you might as well:

http://www.home-ec101.com/

http://domesticservitude.blogspot.com/

http://www.housekeepingchannel.com/

http://orgjunkie.com/

The Home Ec one I find useful and have subscribed to her regular e-mail updates. I find interesting tips in my email that actually do make me more efficient.

The last one “Orgjunkie” allows me to segue into the first topic in having a housework strategy.

I like to call what I do ‘house work’ instead of ‘house cleaning’ because the key to a pleasant home is more than just sanitizing the surfaces. It is organizing and clearing things up.

If you go through your house and dust and wash everything but you still have every room simply filled with ‘stuff’, then your home may be ‘clean’ but it is hardly a neat and comfortable place. Organizing what you own and deciding what you will keep and where is the first thing you must do when you attack a room for a true ‘deep cleaning’.

Making Their Woman's Home Sparkling Clean Should Be Every REAL hubbies Desire...

I have talked about ‘Maintenance Cleaning’ before and that is the set of routine chores that must be done over and over and over again. You do the laundry every week. You scrub the toilet at LEAST once a week. You wash the dishes after every meal. You vacuum regularly, etc. These things have to be done and it is a part of every week’s functions.

But the other side of keeping your home neat and pleasant is the ‘Deep Cleaning’ part. To be a proper house keeper or even ‘male maid’ (with our without the high heels and petticoats) you need to regularly clean your house from top to bottom, one room at a time.

Do your chores regularly and with a smile!

I suggest that you simply choose a room to start in. Look around the house, which room is the biggest mess? You’ll probably figure it out pretty quickly. Once you have decided, start picking up everything that is not attached or is not proper furniture for that room and decide whether you should sell it, donate it, throw it out, or clean it and put it where it belongs.

You need to start by making 3 piles. Sell it. Donate it. Or throw it away. Everything either goes into one of those piles or gets cleaned and put where it belongs.

When you have done this and it’s not as easy as it sounds. I think that you are probably a bit like me and you are sentimental about everything. But in order to be the cleaning servant that your woman wants you to be it is time to be ruthless. Eliminate clutter!

Don't just wipe and clean, ORGANIZE!!!

When clutter is eliminated, you will also find that your housework goes so much faster and things look so much better than they did before. Ask yourself, “Is it easier to wash a counter top that has ten items on it or one that has one or two?” In order to CLEAN that kitchen counter top EVERY DAY, you need to move every item on it and put it back. Get rid of things you don’t need or store them where they do belong!

Whew! Once the emotional trauma of removing all of your old treasures that you no longer, or probably ever needed to begin with is over, you can begin to ‘clean’ the room. Remember organize, then clean.

Clean the room by going from Top to Bottom! Of course! Dirt and dust and gunk fall down hill. It’s like taking a shower and drying your hair first afterward. You dry it first because the water will run down hill if you don’t. Dirt is the same way while you clean, it will fall downhill onto previously clean surfaces if you let it. Take a broom to the ceiling corners and get rid of dust and cobwebs. Then wipe or wash the blades on the ceiling fan. Dust the shelves and the picture frames. Don’t forget the tops of the door frames! Then clean and polish the furniture and the items on them. Finally, sweep and vacuum the floor and rugs. Top to bottom....

You can just pick a corner and move either left or right from there. Just do whatever gets you moving and feeling like you have a plan.

Try it this weekend. Dedicate at least 2 to 3 hours to doing nothing else. When you are done, it will look good and you will feel proud! And how about your woman!? Well! If you have never actually deep cleaned a room for her before she will LOVE IT! And oh boy is that ever worth the time and energy!

Do it right and earn the acceptance and joy of your woman. WHAT could be better?

In Part III, I will give you a rundown of what some of my house work weekends are like.

What is my hobby? My hobby is House Work! Part 1

When we take on the role of ‘supportive spouse’ (or is that ‘support spouse’?), a big part of that role is doing the jobs our Ladies don’t really want to do. We do them for them instead. Relieving her from the stress and the drudgery of house hold chores is one of the greatest gifts a man can give his woman.

I am certain that I am preaching to the choir here when I say this but to become a truly ‘Surrendered Husband’ means that you are going to be spending a lot of time sweeping, dusting, vacuuming, washing, scrubbing, doing the laundry and tidying up. Most women find this work boring and degrading at some level. And since they were born into a world that expects this to be their role, they also find it rather odious.

In many traditional homes, housework is seen as a trap for most ladies.

I think that those reasons alone are enough reason for hubby to do the housework from now on. They illustrate just why it is such a great gift to your woman as well!

When I first realized what an important thing this could be, I dove in head first! “I am going to make her house the cleanest best place a woman ever lived and I refuse to allow her to lift ONE FINGER to do any more housework ever again!!!!” I swore to myself.

I took over the regular maintenance cleaning right away and as soon as I had that under control I tried to jump into deep cleaning. One thing that threatened to get in my way of all this was, and it really was my fault, that there was leftover ‘dude work’ to be done. She had wanted me to do several things that are expected of most husbands.  She had been nagging me to get to some of these chores for a long time and had about given up. In her mind even though she was not keen on doing housework herself, she WAS keen on having me do the ‘hubby chores’. So until I could get those all under control I really couldn’t dedicate myself to relieving her of 'her job’. I needed to do my own first .

I shouldn’t use the pejorative ‘nag’ any more.  I should say that she was “encouraging me”? – Our women certainly don’t ‘nag’. They ‘instruct’ and ‘encourage’ us to do things that we ‘should be doing’. Only when we refuse or fail to do them do they ‘correct’ and ‘re-instruct’. Now isn’t that a much better way to think of the time and effort our ladies put in to making us better hubbies? 

Being "Instructed by our Ladies" is something we can either enjoy or endure. Our choice.

One of bigger the ‘Dude Chores’ that she had wanted me to do for a long time was to sand and stain the kitchen cabinets. This was one of those things that ‘hubby will get around to’. Well she had already waited over a year for me to ‘get around to it’ by the time I did so. She had pretty much given up on me ever doing it and this saddened and frustrated her.

Knowing this and seeing it as an opportunity to serve, I jumped right in and got that project under way. At this time I was a ball of energy! I had gotten so much positive feedback about the maintenance housework that I had started doing that I could continue to do that AND get this job done too.

I remember one conversation we had at this time. It had become a pattern for us where she wanted me to do some ‘dude job’ or ‘hubby chore’ and had ‘suggested’ it to me. I dragged my feet knowing that I ‘...probably should...’ do it, but I really didn’t care if I did it or not. It really was not a very mature attitude for me to cop. Either do it, or say why you don’t think that you should! But no I played the role of the useless whiny little boy and simply nodded along “OK, OK, whatever!” and then dragged my feet and did nothing. It was like the following Oh too true joke that we see floating around the internet today :

 

And that's a TRU FACT!

We had had a number of these “conversations” over several years where I was “reminded” about all the things that I should have done already and “asked” when I would do them. She got angry. I got defensive. It was not pretty. Nor was it helpful in any way.

Anyway we were alone one evening and she had decided that it was time for another such “instructive” session. She was all prepared to do battle in the same non-productive fashion as we always had. Only this time was different. She started going down her list of things I had been dragging my heels on for a long time and just stopped herself in the middle. “You have been so good lately that I don’t have anything left to complain about! Everything on my list is either done or in progress. I really like this change that has come over you lately.” it was really kind of funny. But I really had been her ‘good boy’ for months at that point and we have not had a discussion like that one since!

I did it and I pleased her.

OK, sanding the cabinets is really not as much fun as doing the “women’s work” but it had to be done and having it done (especially done by me) would actually please her more than simply relieving her of the housework. And is this REALLY about making her happy, or just some 'fantasy' of ours?

So I set out to do the ‘dude chores’ in such a way that I would STILL have time to do the basic maintenance housework as well.

Sanding the cabinets had you guessed it, made a mess of the kitchen with there was saw dust everywhere. This was the perfect segue into my doing even more housework! After I had cleaned up the room itself and washed the walls and floors, I took EVERYTHING one item at a time out of the cabinets and had it cleaned. Most was easy. I filled the dishwasher with plates and glasses and ran it while I cleaned the shelf and the inside of the cabinet off. 

Sometimes a guy has to do what a guy has to do!

 

When that load was done, I would do the next cabinet. This took a while and I managed to scour every pot and pan and re-arrange all the spices and pantry items and well…. You get the picture. Working nights and the weekend it took me a full week to get the kitchen all ‘Deep Cleaned’.

She said very little during this manic time for me. She probably thought that I had 'gone off the deep end' again (we do that more than they do you know...) but as long as what I was doing wasn't hurting anyone and it was cleaning the kitchen, just leave him alone!

I simply came home from work, changed my clothes, ate and after I did the dishes for that night I stayed out there cleaning. I have to admit that for me it was ‘cathartic’. I felt in some small way that I was making amends for having ignored the jobs I should have done and this was again a token way of atoning for having left it all for her to do for all those years.

Yes, I felt a bit of ‘male atonement’ not just for her but for how we all had been treating women in general since the dawn of time. Cleaning the house, I suppose has a way of cleansing the soul.

When it was ALL done, I presented it to her and I heard the words that have meant more to me than anything. She looked at all my work and said: “This is great. I suddenly feel so ‘Liberated’.” 

Now honestly in all your life is ANYTHING worth more than this look on your Queen's face?

There is just SOMETHING about a woman feeling like a “Liberated Lady” that excites me to my very core. All the visions of women coming to power and overcoming a past where they were confined to second class status and now finally rising into the lead in so many places where they have always belonged is just a fulfilling and exciting one to me. And I think the term was appropriate considering the dynamics of what was going on at the time in our home.

In part 2, I will talk about the more current dynamic of where house work and dude work fit together...