Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Everybody has their own mental bar denoting what a “clean” house looks like. If you’re happy with the state of your house and the amount of stuff you have in it, then you can probably skip this post. But if you’re not, there are a bazillion different books, websites, and videos giving you ideas about how to improve the state of your home. I’ll make it a bazillion and one by sharing my own thoughts.

I hate cleaning, but even more than that, I hate looking at a mess and knowing that I have to “waste” my time and clean it. So my basic approach is to ABC: Always Be Cleaning. (Every self-help article like this needs a cheesy acronym, right?) For example, when I finish making dinner, I don’t leave the dishes in the sink to greet me the following morning, I take 5 minutes and clean them up. Doing little bits of cleaning here and there feels a lot less painful than ruining two hours of my Saturday because the kitchen turned into a nightmare.

Coupled with that, I also force myself to clean up the area before starting any project. Even if I clean up at the end of a task, the area slowly gets messy again. This is especially true out in the garage. So before I start that next big project, I pick up all my tools, clean off my bench, and organize the piles of wood. Then I’m excited to work in that nice clean area instead of tripping over stuff on the floor and never having room on the bench.

My approach can be neatly summed up by the Broken Window Theory. If you read that linked Wikipedia article, you’ll see the theory summed up like this:

Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.

 

Or consider a pavement. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of refuse from take-out restaurants there or even break into cars.

It’s pretty easy to tell when an area is clean. I feel an emotional response to setting that first piece of junk in the nice clean area. But then I get used to seeing it there and it doesn’t bother me so much. In fact, it gets easier and easier to just throw more junk in that area because hey, I have to clean it out anyway, right? Pretty soon it’s a huge mess and now I have to do one of those big huge cleanouts and my quality of life is negatively impacted because I’m annoyed by the thought of that big cleaning event coming up.

It’s surprising how often this theory applies. For example, we talk about it regularly at work when someone proposes a less than beautiful piece of code. Just take the time to fix it now because your hack will open the floodgates for more hacks until we’re left with a nightmare that we don’t have time to re-architect. If you want to get a little geekier about it, you might propose that messes grow exponentially.

If you’ve already got a system that works for you, then stick with it! But if you need a little more encouragement, remember the broken window theory.

My brother-in-law, LukeS, is the principal and upper grades teacher at Zion Lutheran School in Toledo, OH. He had a rude awakening around midnight Monday night. The school was on fire! The boiler room is a complete loss and there is water damage throughout the school. The local news has two video segments (1 and 2) showing the result of the fire and there is a LOT of work to do to get the building back into shape.

It’s going to take a long time to get the building fixed, but this is obviously the middle of the school year. They are hoping to get some portable buildings in place for a temporary school location, but their insurance will only cover $10K toward that. To help cover the large price gap, they have started a Go Fund Me page. Please consider helping them out with a donation, and whether you donate or not, please keep them in your prayers.

I lived much of my life not realizing that gas has a relatively short shelf life. I figured it out by sending one of church’s mowers to the mechanic because it was running terribly. The result? He replaced the gas and it ran beautifully. The gas had gone bad sitting in the shed over the winter.

Common estimates say that after about 3 months, your ethanol blended gas (which is almost everything you buy these days) should be thrown away and replaced. If you put Sta-Bil or some other fuel stabilizer in it, you might get 6-12 months. The longer you store the gas, the more water that the ethanol attracts. Watered down gas is a mess for your engine to deal with. At best you’ll get decreased fuel mileage and power, but in extreme cases you can really mess up your vehicle.

It’s not a big deal in cars because we generally run through the tanks of gas pretty quickly. It’s a more common problem in lawn equipment. During the winter months, that gas is effectively rotting in your shed and gums up your carburetor.

To help avoid these problems, I do a few things:

1. Whenever I fill up our gas can, I set a reminder to replace it in two months. The can is pretty small so I usually just pour it into my car’s gas tank when the car is already mostly full. I figure it can deal with a gallon or two of older gas mixed in with 10 gallons of good gas.
2. The last time I fill up the lawnmower for the season, I use ethanol free gasoline. You can buy it from special gas stations, or you can pick up a can from the home center. It’s not cheap but spending a couple extra bucks to save yourself the headache of cleaning a carburetor is probably worth it.
3. My weedwacker accepts multiple attachments so I can also use it as a leaf blower and an edger. It gets used pretty often during the spring, summer and fall, but even then, I hardly go through any gas. Rather than keep a small gas can with oil-mixed gas that will go bad before I use it all, I just buy the premixed ethanol free gas. It lasts “forever” and I don’t have to remember where I put the oil to mix in.

It costs a little extra but these simple steps can save you time, headaches and money.

P.S. It feels like I just wrote an eHow article. Ew.