A “home” can be any place where you feel safe and comfortable. It’s the place that feels like it’s “yours.” But how do you make a living space into a home? There are lots of ways! It doesn’t matter what your home looks like, or where it is, or your level of ability. There’s always something you can do to make it more comfortable and more “you.” That’s where home skills come in.
Home skills include activities like cooking, vacuuming, laundry, and repairing. They’re important, but they can also be really fun! If you learn to be your own cook, you’ll have a useful skill that you can use to support yourself and show off to others. That also goes for cleaning up, or repairing broken things.
Have you ever looked at a beautiful meal and thought “wow, I could never make food like that?” You may not be ready to cook a huge, tricky masterpiece, but most cooking skills are fun and easy to learn. Even the most famous chefs use a whole bunch of basic skills, which a beginner can try. The more skills you learn, the more different meals you will be able to make, and the better they will all taste!
That’s how you learn home skills: step-by-step. With every new skill you learn, the place you live will feel a little bit more like a home… And you’ll know that it was your own home skills that made it happen! That’s definitely something to be proud of!
Hungry? CLICK HERE to learn how to cook!
For other Home Skills, read on below.
Tidying Up
Have you ever tried to find something, but there was just too much other stuff lying around? Have you ever tried to clean a table, but then you had to move a billion different objects off the table before you could? Have you ever felt overwhelmed by all the things lying around your room?
When too many little things are making our homes messy, that’s called “clutter.” It happens to everyone, but it’s important to keep it under control: a cluttered home can be hard to live, work, and play in! How can we focus on one single job, like cleaning or looking for something, when there’s so much stuff all over the place? Clutter can definitely affect your mental health. That’s why tidying up clutter is a useful skill to learn.
The first step to fixing clutter is good use of storage. Make sure every little thing in your home has a place to live, and then return it to that place after you’re done using it. For example, knives and forks probably live in the kitchen drawer. After you’re done using and washing knives and forks, make sure to put them back in that same drawer. That way they won’t clutter up your kitchen, and you’ll know where to find them next time! That doesn’t just work in the kitchen: pencils, blankets, games, remote controls… Everything can have a place to live. If you don’t have enough places to store things, try to get some more drawers, boxes, or other storage for your home.
Bedrooms are one of the toughest (but most important) areas to tidy up! Here’s a great video on how to clean your bedroom:
Doing Laundry
Doing laundry is important: since we wear clothing all day, it can get dirty really fast! Other things, like bedsheets and blankets, also need to be cleaned pretty often.
A good rule is to wash underwear and shirts after every time you wear them, while some pants and sweaters can be worn multiple times before washing. As for the sheets, pillowcases, and blankets on your bed, those should be washed about once every two weeks.
The complicated thing about laundry is that every washing machine and drying machine is a little bit different. Luckily, there are a few simple buttons that should work every time! This video will teach you how to do laundry using a standard washer and dryer:
If you don’t have a washer and dryer at home, you may have to go to a laundromat instead. A laundromat is a business that has lots of washing and drying machines, and you can pay money to use them.
The machines at laundromats are even easier to use than home washers and dryers… And if you need to some help, there will probably be people to ask. Don’t worry if you have to use a laundromat: tons of people visit them every day!
This video will teach you how to do laundry at a laundromat.
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