Many homes are simply unthinkable without a domestic helper. Especially in global cosmopolitan enterprising city states like Hong Kong, this is more prominent than elsewhere. If you have lived in Hong Kong, it must be a common knowledge how residents depend upon maids and domestic help for all their household jobs. The domestic helpers in Hong Kong are hired for daily household jobs like petcare, nursery care and children’s upkeep, room cleaning, laundry, cooking and food serving, gardening, etc. Maids and housekeeping staffs are entitled to get weekly holidays apart from few statutory holidays in a year.
The real challenge for a homeowner is to maintain and upkeep the residence in the absence of their domestic helper. Even a weekly holiday for them can prove to be challenging as the residents need to fill their absence with housekeeping jobs themselves. In many houses where kids and teens are unable to do a single thing on their own, it becomes an even bigger challenge. Many families also harbour an opinion that they cannot survive a single day without domestic help. There are also families that require trained persons to take care of the elderly and disabled persons in the family.
All these make it even more challenging for the homeowners to fulfil their household duties in the absence of domestic helper. Such sheer necessity is felt louder in the case of homes with working parents and responsibilities for taking care of children and seniors. But the question is how can you cope with such a situation when your domestic help is absent. Do you have any clue? Well, here we are going to explain a few tested and tried tips to help you fulfil this gap when domestic help is absent.
Prepared yourself and family members mentally
Living in an organised manner depends upon a mindset rather than just any technique. First of all, you need to sensitise yourself and your dear family members for taking certain responsibilities of their household duties. Self-help for most day to day tasks is cool and make you smart for all living conditions. To motivate your little ones for self-help activities, you should create an example first. By doing a few important cleansing task or just trying to organise the home a bit, you set an example for your kids, and in days when your maidservant becomes absent, this does you a great favour.
Learn prioritising tasks in such days
One of the well known and effective ways to stay organised and neat irrespective of the absence of domestic help is to prioritise certain day to day tasks, especially in holidays when your maidservant is not coming. For instance, for a single day leaving the laundry unwashed will not amount to a big trouble if you do not need to wash a garment urgently. But you cannot leave the rooms in messy condition, or you just cannot skip cooking or feeding the elderly and disabled. So, while certain tasks can be left for a day, there are others that need to be done almost regularly without any exception.
Make a habit of staying organised and neat
There are certain households that always look neat and organised, even during few days of absence of the domestic helper. This happens because of the homeowner’s good habit of staying organised. If you can procure such a habit of keeping things in their designated places and tidying things in rooms quite often, you can make things look organised in your home quite naturally. People with such habit feels much lesser pain during holidays of their maidservants and domestic help.
Keep additional utensils and clothes
When your domestic helpers are not around on holidays, you can easily avoid washing your soiled clothes or used utensils only if you have clean alternatives for them. For holidays it is wise to keep some extra set of utensils for your cooking and dining purposes to avoid washing yourself. To change the bed clothes and room furnishings in such days, always keep a few extra pieces.
Focus on clearing the clutter
A room sports off a clean and uncluttered look simply by clearing the junk and making the room tidy with all objects organised properly. In holidays when your maidservant is not coming, just gather all the trash in one plays and keep all the dirty and washable things together. In this way, you can at least make the room look more organised and keep rest of the cleaning jobs for your domestic helper to attend the very next day. In this respect, one small piece of useful advice would be to avoid buying all the non-essential things that over time only amounts to junk.
Follow a schedule
Why is a schedule so essential for home? Well, with a schedule you can utilise your day time more appropriately to complete as much as tasks possible while not falling victim to tiredness. In days when the domestic helper remains absent family people need to engage with daily housekeeping tasks and thus actually fall behind their usual routine. This often takes up their entire holiday time leaving a bitter impression in body and mind. To sort this out, make a detailed schedule with a list of priority. In this way, you need to work less while leaving the better part of your day for yourself.
Don’t do everything alone, delegate tasks
When one takes too many tasks upon herself, and the whole family enjoys free time, it becomes counterproductive and becomes a cause of suffering for one member of the family. This ultimately makes the family unhappy and spoils the holiday mood for everyone. Instead of leaving all the responsibilities with one member, split the tasks among several members as per capacity and complete everything in an organised manner. Such an approach would invariably leave everyone happy and help to uplift the mood.
In conclusion,
If you think, it is too much of trouble to maintain and manage the home without any domestic helper; you are making it even tougher by silently killing your motivation. Rather take such days as an opportunity to prove yourself flexible and smart in daily living.
