I'm just knackered!!

[Bornin1982]

I'm sure it's been asked on here many a time, but I'm too tired to check! 🤣

How do you all manage 9-5's and housework and a good work life balance and keep your sanity? I feel like I work, eat, clean and sleep! I leave for work at 7, start at 8, and get home around 6 ish- 5 days a week.

I get home - cook dinner - me and hubby share other chores that need doing, have quick showers. We're usually not sitting down until 8ish - asleep by 9 😱

We can't afford a cleaner and I can't afford to drop hours, sadly. Any tips that could help me carve out a bit of normal downtime, please send them my way xx

Couple of things that helped - get all the gadgets/tech you can to make cleaning as effective as possible - robot vacuum, dishwasher, tumble dryer.

For us it works best to do only bare minimum cleaning in the week then blitz the place at weekends. Bare minimum for us is loading/unloading dishwasher, one load of laundry inc folding and putting away every other day (didn't bother ironing), quick wipe over surfaces, bins out, quick tidy up particularly focusing on making sure there's nothing on the floor so robovac could do his work. Then we did 'proper' cleaning at weekends i.e. full tidying and sorting, dusting, hoovering/mopping, bathrooms etc. When it was just two adults at home who were out most of the day, living in a small 2 bedroom place, we got it to a place where the adult who wasn't cooking (we alternated) could do the quick chores after dinner in about 20-30 mins, then the 'full' clean took both of us about 1-2 hours at the weekend - the house was not show home perfect with that but never filthy. Other people do prefer methods such as The Organised Mum (you can follow her cleaning methods even if you don't have young kids) that have you doing more each weekday but less at weekends, we gave that a go but found we preferred our method as like you we were knackered in the evenings and couldn't really face doing lots of cleaning?

Are both you and your DP really cooking and cleaning for a full 2 hours between 6-8 every weekday as that seems a lot? Showering surely only takes 10 mins if you are quick so where's the rest of the time going? Do you have young kids as obviously that makes a huge difference, or do you live in a particularly big house? Can you focus on cutting down on the cooking time a bit perhaps rather than the cleaning, do you batch cook? I don't mean the lunatic things you see on social media where people spend 8 hours making meals for a month, just doubling up portion sizes so you only need to 'properly' cook every other day (then on the alternate days it's usually only preparing some veg and maybe boiling pasta or rice or similar)? If you're like my DP and don't like eating the same meal twice in a row you can freeze the extra portion and build a 'bank' of frozen meals up on the same principle. I will admit we do have a weekly takeaway and weekly 'easy' freezer meal of cheat foods (things like ready prepared pies, fresh filled pasta, pasta with fresh prepared sauce, or very simple things like eggs on toast or beans on toast) so between that and batch cooking I really tend to only properly cook once or at most twice on a weekday which really helps.

Also, sorry I know you said changing work not an option, but you obviously have a long-ish commute of an hour each way, any chance of reducing that, either by changing jobs for one closer to home or would working from home occasionally help? Saving two hours a day even once a week would be huge for you and even if yours is the kind of job that doesn't allow a quick 10 mins to stick laundry on, just cutting down commute time is great for your energy levels.

Or can you compress your hours so you do a 9 day fortnight, swapping your 9-5 for a 9-6 or 8-5 gets you a day off once a fortnight which again given your commute makes sense to try and maximise office hours?

Thank you for your reply. Lots of helpful tips. Getting organised with meals, that would help a lot, I always know what I'm cooking but I don't batch and prep in advance, I'll definitely give that a try. We don't have a dishwasher either so that definitely eats into time even though I wash up as I go along as I cook.
We don't have young children but 2 teens (they do help) but I don't like to put a lot on them as they have heavy days at school themselves - we just ask they tidy up after themselves and keep their rooms tidy, they are good at keeping their end of the bargain. Our house definitely isn't huge but there just always seems to be something that needs doing. Getting home at 6ish is usually between 6 and 6:15. I do washing everyday and ironing ready for the next because I refuse to stand an iron of a weekend, I hate it when you look at a huge pile 😱. I think I just need to get in to established routines that work around my new hours. I went from less hours to more because of money really, being honest. I love my new job and door to door the commute only takes 25 minutes or so but there's no parking and so I have to park further away from the office and walk the rest. If I were to use public transport it would be even longer. I'd love somewhere closer but that's just not an option at the minute unfortunately. Thank you for your suggestions x

Batch cooking, slow cooking easy stuff (taming twins has some easy recipes, not all slow cooked) and meal planning (ball ache, but it works for us). I buy cheats things like prepped or frozen veg and grated cheese
Avoiding clutter, esp on surfaces, so they’re easy to clean
i don’t iron. I hang stuff on wooden hangers to dry. OH irons his work shirts
I refuse to do a full clean over the weekend. I’d rather clean on a Thursday/Friday evening, even if late and just keep on top of things over the weekend.