Billy Wetterer: Save time and energy with easier housekeeping

 Although it would be nice, we don't live in a spotless home so I hesitate to write about "keeping house."

 The major problem with "housework" is that the only time you notice it is when it's not done. Seems like I've written that before. I know I've said it many times.

 So what brought that to mind?

 This week I decided to clean our coffeemaker. It's an older model Bunn and when it takes almost 5 minutes to make a pot of coffee I know it's getting clogged with hard water gunk. When it's cleaned, we can make a pot of coffee in about 2 minutes.

 After breakfast a couple of days ago, I put the remaining coffee in an insulated carafe to be enjoyed later. Then I poured a measure of vinegar into the coffee maker and let it sit for a couple of hours.

 I laughed to myself, remembering the time several months ago when I cleaned the coffee maker after supper one evening and didn't completely rinse all the vinegar from the appliance. Obviously I didn't know that. The next morning I had promised to be in Grand Island early so I made a pot of coffee for my husband, poured a cup for myself to drink on the road and left home.

 About half way to town I took a sip of coffee and gagged. It still had the taste of vinegar. My husband wouldn't be happy. More about that later.

 After I let the vinegar soak the hard water buildup in my coffeemaker, I poured a measure of clear water through it, forcing the vinegar into the coffee pot.

 Surely that hot vinegar must be good for something, I thought. Then I recalled that a couple of our sink drains were running slowly so I poured a half cup of baking soda into each drain and half the pot of hot vinegar water into each drain.

 Did it work? After the soda and vinegar stopped bubbling, I ran hot water from the faucet down the drain and they both worked much better.

 As for the coffeemaker, I poured several measures of water through it until the water was clear. I learned the hard way that vinegar-flavored coffee tastes awful.

 What happened when my husband drank the coffee I made still had traces of vinegar? When I asked him about it he said, "I thought the coffee tasted kind of funny."

 Talk about an understatement! Bless his heart, it was really bad.

 Back to my original thought about "housework." The vinegar caper took quite a bit of time and when the project was completed, who but me would know -- or even care?

 As I wrote at the beginning of this column, I would love to have a spotless house -- and I don't. However, over the years I have learned a few tricks that make the job easier.

 Keeping up with jobs saves time in the long run. For example, I keep window cleaner and a roll of paper towel in the bathroom cabinet so I can wipe down the shower, stool, lavatory and mirror as needed and throw the used paper towel into the waste basket.

 Speaking of waste baskets, we keep one in every room. Plastic grocery bags make excellent liners. A couple of times a week, I take the large garbage bag from beneath the kitchen sink and go around the house emptying waste baskets into that bag to be taken outside and disposed of.

 How two people can accumulate that much stuff to pitch into the waste baskets is beyond me. Newspapers are put into a grocery bag to be recycled.

 We can talk more about "easy house keeping" another time.



Billy Wetterer writes a weekly column for The Independent. E-mail her at billybillw@aol.com.