Homemaking

Homemaking is a mainly American term for the management of a home, otherwise known as housework, housekeeping or household management (the act of overseeing the organizational, financial, day-to-day operations of a house or estate, and the managing of other domestic concerns). This domestic consumption work creates goods and services within a household, such as meals, childcare, household repairs, or the manufacture of clothes and gifts. Common tasks include cleaning, cooking, and looking after children. A person in charge of the homemaking, who isn't employed outside the home, is in the U.S. and Canada often called a homemaker, a gender-neutral term for a housewife or a househusband. The term "homemaker" may, however, also refer to a social worker who manages a household during the incapacity of the housewife.

Housework is not always a lifetime commitment; many, for economic or personal reasons, return to the workplace. In previous decades, there were many mandatory courses for the young to learn the skills of homemaking. In high school, courses included cooking, nutrition, home economics, family and consumer science (FACS), and food and cooking hygiene. This last one may underlie the tradition that a homemaker is portrayed wearing an apron. More recently, most of these courses have been abolished, and many youths in high school and college would be more likely to study child development and the management of children's behavior.

Household tools

The method and function of housework are different in the industrial world and in other countries, with the balance of convenience, labor-saving devices and easier methods being in the industrial homemaker's favor. The reason for this is that mechanical invention has been applied extensively to different tasks of the home. Inventors have developed mechanical labor-saving devices not only for the shop and office, but also for the home. There are, on the market, thousands of household tools, devices and equipment for every domestic need. It only remains for the homemaker to choose between them.

Another reason for the great supply and demand for household labor savers in the industrial world is that the homemaker has to face the increasingly complex problem of scarce domestic help. With cheap labor, the need for the mechanical replacers of labor, or "mechanical servants," will not be keenly felt, however, the majority of homemakers perform their own household tasks. It is to this class of homemakers who are actively concerned in domestic work that the labor-saver and improved modern tool most appeal. The homemaker's time and effort are worth conserving by every means. Homemakers should therefore, be eager to buy and use all the household tools which will save her strength and time and liberate her from household drudgery.

Housekeeping

Housekeeping by the homemaker is the care and control of property, ensuring its maintenance and proper use and appearance. A home is a place of residence. In a private home a maid or housekeeper might be employed to do the housekeeping. Housework is work done by the act of housekeeping. Some housekeeping is housecleaning and some housekeeping is home chores. Home chores are housework that needs to be done at regular intervals, Housekeeping includes the budget and control of expenditures, preparing meals and buying food, paying the heat bill, and cleaning the house. Outdoor housecleaning chores include removing leaves from rain gutters, washing windows, sweeping doormats, cleaning the pool, putting away lawn furniture, and taking out the trash.

Housecleaning by the homemaker is the systematic process of making a home neat and clean. This may be applied more broadly that just an individual home, or as a metaphor for a similar "clean up" process applied elsewhere such as a procedural reform. In the process of housecleaning general cleaning activities are completed, such as disposing of rubbish, storing of belongings in regular places, cleaning dirty surfaces, dusting and vacuuming. The details of this are various and complicated enough that many books have been published on the subject. How-to sites on the internet have many articles on housecleaning. 

Maintenance

Homemakers that follow predictive maintenance techniques determine the condition of in-service equipment in order to predict when maintenance should be performed. This approach offers cost savings over routine or time-based maintenance, because tasks are performed only when warranted. Homemakers that follow preventive maintenance methods ensure that household equipment and the house are in satisfactory operating condition by providing for inspection, detection, and correction of incipient failures either before they occur or before they develop into major defects.

Home maintenance

Home maintenance involves the diagnosis and resolution of problems in a home, and is related to home maintenance to avoid such problems. Many types of maintenance are "Do it yourself" (DIY) projects. Maintenance is not necessarily the same as home improvement, although many improvements can result from repairs or maintenance. Often the costs of larger repairs will justify the alternative of investment in full-scale improvements. It may make just as much sense to upgrade a home system (with an improved one) as to repair it or incur ever-more-frequent and expensive maintenance for an inefficient, obsolete or dying system. For a DIY project, also useful is the established limits on time and money investments before a repair (or list of repairs) become overwhelming and discouraging, and less likely to ever be completed.

Lawn maintenance

Homemakers that have a lawn responsibility adhere to seasonal lawn care practices, which vary to some extent depending on the climate zone and type of grass that is grown (whether cool season or warm season varieties). Various recognized method used by homemakers in lawn care are observed in any area. At spring or early summer, homemakers seed, sod, or sprig a yard when the ground is warmer. Summer lawn care by homemakers have lawn mower at high cutting for cool season grass, and lower cutting for warm season lawns. At the autumn time, lawns are mowed by homemakers at a lower height and thatch buildup that occurs in warm season grasses are removed. Homemakers do add sandy loam and apply fertilizer, containing some type of wetting agent. Cool season lawns are planted in the autumn with adequate rainfall. Lawn care in the winter is minimal, requiring only light feedings of organic material, such as green-waste compost, and minerals to encourage earthworms and beneficial microbes.

Management

Household management by the homemaker is the act of overseeing the organizational, financial, and day-to-day operations of a house or estate. It differs from housekeeping, which consists of the physical maintenance and cleaning of a house.

Household purchasing

Household purchasing refers to homemaker's attempt to acquire goods or services to accomplish the goals of the household. Though there are several households that attempt to set standards in the purchasing process, processes can vary greatly between households. Typically the word “purchasing” is not used interchangeably with the word “procurement”, since procurement typically includes other concepts. Home makers decide the market goods that the household will buy, such as the groceries which have been bough at a grocer's.

Another important purchase handled by homemakers is the power source used for appliances. Home or other building heating may include boilers, furnaces, and water heaters. Compressed natural gas is used in rural homes without connections to piped-in public utility services, or with portable grills. However, due to being less economical than LPG, LPG (Propane) is the dominant source of rural gas for natural gas-powered ranges and/or ovens, natural gas-heated clothes dryers, heating/cooling and central heating. The amount of usages is determined by factors such as natural gas prices.

Work strategies

In sociology, household work strategy is the division of labour between members of a household, whether implicit or the result of explicit decision–making, with the alternatives weighed up in a simplified type of cost-benefit analysis. It is a plan for the relative deployment of household members' time between the three domains of employment:

in the market economy, including home-based self-employment second jobs, in order to obtain money to buy goods and services in the market;

domestic production work, such as cultivating a vegetable patch or raising chickens, purely to supply food to the household; and

domestic consumption work to provide goods and services directly within the household, such as cooking meals, child–care, household repairs, or the manufacture of clothes and gifts.