Housewarming

“ One should especially beware while house cleaning of what Bishop Hall calls the "lust of finishing." Try to clean only as much each day as can be put back into habitable order by the time the men of the household come home. One room a day is all a woman unaided should try to do. Mankind are [338] pleased to make jokes about house cleaning and glad am I that they can take it that way, for really it is a trial of character to come home tired and hungry and find the house cold, the rooms in disorder and a picnic supper spread in the kitchen by an overwrought wife. ”

“ The perfect house, as I conceive it, is to combine as many of the advantages of living out of doors as may be consistent with warmth and shelter, and one of these is the sympathy with green and growing things. ”

“ They don't know what us wants." Sympathy with, interest in the poor so as to help them, can only be got by long and close intercourse with each in her own house—not patronising—not "talking down" to them—not "prying about;" sympathy which will grow in insight and love with every visit; which will enable you to show the cottage mother on the spot how to give air to the bedroom, &c. You could not get through the daily work of the cottage mother—the washing, cooking, cleaning, mending, making. ”

“ Late hours, business worry, nerve-wrecking noises, the hurry, the wear and tear of living in a crowd, the dust and filth of the city air, the struggle of competition,—these would be replaced by purer, saner surroundings if parents settled in some country place where children are born with a heritage of fresh air, grassy playgrounds, wholesome daily tasks in the house and out of doors, and are fed in a simple manner befitting their surroundings. ”

“ In rural agricultural districts the home-keeper is the provider. She practically requisitions from farm and garden what she deems necessary for the family table. To an extent she makes the clothing and sews the house linen. She also exchanges her perquisites, egg money, perhaps, for furniture and ornaments. The itinerant peddler brings the world’s wares to her door; the mail-order houses do the rest.
“The ideal home is a social and coöperative society in which all of its members unite their efforts for the common good. ”

“ A well-arranged kitchen forms an important part of the smoothly running mechanism of the ideal home
First of all, the home must be comfortable, and its whole atmosphere must be that of peace. In no other way can the tension of modern life be overcome. This implies order and cleanliness, beauty, warmth, light, and air; but it implies far more. It means a home planned for the people who will occupy it, and so planned that father's needs, and mother's, and the children's, will all be met. What does each member of the family require of the house? ”

“ The progress of domestic living has been in cleanliness, in ventilation, in health, in decorum, in countless means and arts of comfort, in the concentration of all the utilities of every clime in each house. ”

“ There were broad windows taking in floods of sunshine; fireplaces that glowed with living flames and never smoked; lazy lounging places and cosy corners for busy work or quiet study; sleepy bed-rooms; a kitchen that made housework the finest art and the surest science, and oh, such closets, such stairways, such comforts! such defiance of the elements, such security against cold and heat, against fire, flood and tempest! such economy! such immunity from all the ills that domestic life is heir to, from intractable servants to sewer-gas! ”

“ The servants in the kitchen, the children in the nursery, the master in his study, and the mistress in the drawing-room, also pervading the whole house as, in a landscape, the sun and the blizzard pervade fields, lakes, woods, and mountains alike. To have the children the centre of general attention or running about the house would have seemed to her as revolutionary as trees planted on a dinner-table or poultry at large on a cricket-field. ”

“ But by having this work regularly done, at certain hours daily, by your children, a threefold good may be gained: the house, grounds, and surroundings can be kept free from disagreeable litter; the means secured at the same time, with little labor and no cost, to preserve a healthful atmosphere all through the house; and your children taught a lesson in neatness and industry which they will not in after years forget, and which, whatever their position in life, will always be valuable. ”

“ And us women are beginning to see that twenty houses to a block, each keeping clean and orderly and planted on its own hook, each handing out old clothes and toys down to the Flats, each living its own life of cleanliness and home and victual-giving-at-Christmas, that that ain’t being a town after all. ”

“ A house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird's nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at home there -- in solitary confinement. ”

“ In a new home, house and barn and windmill square-cornered and prosaic, plumped down in a field with wheat coming up to the unporticoed door, a habitation unshadowed, unsheltered, unsoftened, she found a frank cleanness, as though the inhabitants looked squarely out at life, unafraid. ”

“ Increasing numbers are taking what would seem to be the wiser course, and are combining rural pleasures and advantages with their business. As the questions of rapid transit are solved, the welfare of children will turn the scale more and more often against the conventional city house or flat. A home CAN be created in rented dwellings and apartments; but a home for which we have the deed, a cottage surrounded by trees, flowers, lawn, and garden, is the refuge which best satisfies the heart. ”

“ For this reason no social movements on the East Side are worthier of hearty support than those carried on to teach children, and especially girls, "How to keep house." Teach them how to keep house, and they will make homes.
If rent days are the fearful anticipations of tenement house life, meals and their preparation are the pleasurable anticipations of it. At morning, noon and evening the smells of cooking and frying waft from the open doors of the apartments into the halls. ”

“ The new houses were abodes of neatness, health and comfort, and each family took pride in keeping everything in good order. My wife instructed the women in various industries, among them making articles to adorn their houses and themselves, so that they were most willing to accede to her wishes. She gave them flower seeds and every house had its pots of flowers. The women instead of idling, were very busy in their household duties or carrying water for their flowers. The people from the surrounding country for miles came to see my villages as to a fair. ”

“ Hence our household god, Comfort.
We are not satisfied merely with a home. It must be comfortable. The most wretched, indeed, are those who have no homes—the homeless! But not less wretched are those whose homes are without comfort—those of whom Charles Lamb once said, "The homes of the very poor are no homes." ”

“ If we select and take a new house before we attempt our decorations let us instal a caretaker. Ay! even with her grimy self and her still more grimy goods and bronchial family, heavy with the continual colds inseparable from living in empty houses and never anywhere else ”

“ Domesticity asserts its command, by your order, in the aspect of every cottage in your park-like nest. Homely comfort radiates from the hearths and the faces of all who live under your delightful rule. ”

“ Who is there amongst us that has not felt, in walking through the rooms of some uninhabited house, with every appliance of human comfort strewn about, ease and luxury within, wavy trees and sloping lawn or eddying waters without—who, in seeing all these, has not questioned himself as to why this should be deserted? ”

“ Why houses should look so much more homelike, so much more suggestive of shelter and cheer and companionship and love, when the curtains are snug-drawn and the doors shut, and nobody can look in, though the lights of fires and lamps shine out, than they do in broad daylight, with open windows and people coming and going through open doors, and a general air of comradeship and busy living, it is hard to see. But there is not a lonely vagabond in the world who does not know that they do. ”

“ Taste is wanting, for the manager of the household has not yet learnt the Art of Living.
You see the same contrast in cottage life. The lot of poverty is sweetened by taste. It selects the healthiest, openest neighbourhood, where the air is pure and the streets are clean. You see, at a glance, by the sanded doorstep, and the window-panes without a speck,—perhaps blooming roses or geraniums shining through them,—that the tenant within, however poor, knows the art of making the best of his lot. How different from the foul cottage-dwellings you see elsewhere ”

“ In the large houses, the boys sleep till a late breakfast, then lounge about till school-time, then spend three hours in school, stimulating brain and nerves. Then home to a hearty dinner, and then again to school.
So with the girls: in the tenement-houses, they, go to kitchens and shops to work most of the day, with little chance for mental culture or the refinements of taste. In the large mansions, the daughters sleep late, do little or no labor for the family, and spend their time in school, or in light reading, ornamental accomplishments, or amusement. ”

“ In such a well-fitted but unelastic establishment the dinner-hour, the carriage horses, hot water, bedtime, candles, the post, the wash-day, and an extra blanket, from being the ministers of one’s comfort, become the stern arbiters of one’s fate. Spring cleaning—which is something like what it would be to build, paint, and furnish a house, and to “do it at home”—takes place as naturally as the season it celebrates ”

“ From the look of these typically English, cheerful, middle-class, not-too-well-off little homes you'd know just the sort of people who live in them. The plump, house-keeping mother, the season-ticket father, the tennis-playing sons, the girls in dainty blouses, who put their little newly whitened shoes to dry on the bathroom window-sill, and who call laughing remarks to each other out of the window. ”

“ Yes, he often walked to Suffern along the Erie track, and meditated on “what a house should do, a house that has sheltered life,”
That has put its loving wooden arms around a man and his wife,
A house that has echoed a baby’s laugh and held up his stumbling feet. ”

“ It is interesting to note that there is a strong connection still between a disagreeable climate and the love of home. Where it is comfortable and pleasant out of doors, then you find the life of the street, the market place, the café, the plaza. Where it is damp and dark and chill, where rain and wind, snow and ice make it unpleasant without, there you find people gathering about the fireside, and boasting of it as a virtue—merely another instance of the law that makes virtue of necessity. ”

“ A healthy home, presided over by a thrifty, cleanly woman, may be the abode of comfort, of virtue, and of happiness. It may be the scene of every ennobling relation in family life. It may be endeared to a man by many delightful memories, by the affectionate voices of his wife, his children, and his neighbours. Such a Home will be regarded, not as a mere nest of common instinct, but as a training-ground for young immortals, a sanctuary for the heart, a refuge from storms, a sweet resting-place after labour, a consolation in sorrow, a pride in success, and a joy at all times. ”

“ In any cottage and at any time her presence was a welcome one, and every woman and child, when in trouble, flew to her for help and comfort even before they climbed to the vicarage—that refuge of the poor and sorrowing in all country places. ”

“ We raise the house beyond the reach of squalor, we give it measured heat, we give it water in abundance and perfect sanitation and light everywhere, we give it ventilation less successfully than we might, and finally we give it the human quality that is so modern. There are no dungeons in the good modern house, no disgraceful lairs for servants, no horrors of humidity.
MENNOYER DRAWINGS AND OLD MIRRORS SET IN PANELINGS
And so we women have achieved a house, luminous with kind purpose throughout. ”

“ Of course, it’s the easiest part to square up a house physically, if you know how to use tools, but every day I see houses along the road with constitutions absolutely broken down, and a family still struggling to keep a pulse of life within—weather-boards off, chimneys sagging, summer kitchens straggling off drunkenly at the back. ”

“ Every morning let us build a booth to shelter someone from life's fierce heat. Every noon let us dig some life-spring for thirsty lips. Every night let us be food for the hungry and shelter for the cold and naked. ”

“ Suppose that a distracted young housewife on some prosperous farm will sit down among a great pile of women's papers that she takes out of the abundance of her means and the activity of her imaginative idealism, and cry out as she reads the many articles and the innumerable columns of suggestions, "O I should like to have a perfect house and a wonderful system of housekeeping! ”