11 Homemaking Skills Everyone Should know
It’s no surprise that in recent years homemaking skills have been revitalized and are being sought after to learn! These skills can save you loads of time and money.
Learning and cultivating these skills will help you in running your home and personal life. While reducing anxiety and stress along the way!
Without further adieu, let’s jump into this blog post all about homemaking skills!
Homemaking skills might be considered old-fashioned or even vintage. However, these are vital and important skills to have to reduce stress at home.
Making a home is so much more than watching real housewives and going shopping! It is all about creating a comfortable and functional space for you and your family to live.
Homemaking Skills List
1. Planning the Calendar
Planning and keeping ahead of what you have coming up in life is so important! When you keep your calendar up to date and check up on it and plan life around your events it reduces stress tenfold!
Personally, we keep a digital calendar and a physical calendar. The digital calendar allows us to both have notifications on when things are going to happen and when they start.
The physical calendar on the wall allows the whole family to know what is going on and when and see what is coming up on a weekly and monthly basis. Rather than day to day on the digital calendar.
I create a custom calendar every year through Shutterfly and include family birthdays and fun pictures from the previous year!
2. Meal Planning
The second most important homemaking skill is meal planning. This included finding recipes, sourcing groceries, cooking, and dealing with leftovers.
Meals are so important for maintaining good physical health, but also for mental health. Food especially homemade food can bring people together in so many wonderful ways.
I love bringing my family together to eat a warm, home-cooked meal and talk about our lives. It is so rewarding.
3. Keeping a Laundry Schedule
Laundry can be the bain of your existence! Trust me it has been mine in the past. However, staying on top of the laundry can take a huge load off (pun intended;)).
There are so many ways to keep a consistent laundry schedule and it really is up to each family for how it works for them.
For us, we choose one or two days a week to get all the laundry done. We don’t leave the house on those days and just do chores. A big tip is to set timers for when it’s time to swap the laundry.
Timers will help remind you that there’s a task to be done. It is so incredibly helpful!
4. Project Planning
I know you are probably sick of reading about how important planning is in running a home. However, it is so incredibly important to reduce stress at home!
With any home, there are projects that need to get done. Whether it is a home improvement project or rearranging a closet.
Planning the project on the hows and whens will make things run smoothly.
For example, if you are building a garden plan out when you go to the store to get supplies for the box, soil, and seeds or starters.
Then, also plan out when you will build and put together everything. You’ll want to purchase the supplies on a day that maybe is too hot or raining.
Then build the garden on a mild or sunny day.
5. Researching Skills
This one might seem out of the blue, however it might be the most important. Having the ability to reasearch new ideas, recipes, products that you need in your home is vital.
You never know what is out there that can make your life better until you go searching for it!
For example, if you are looking to spice up your cooking routines or meals. You won’t find a new recipe just magically show up on your shelf.
Okay maybe if you have a smart device on your shelf. But typically you need to go searching for it.
A good homemaker would also look for a reicipe that uses what you have surplus of.
Another example of meal planning. I use bell peppers in one or two recipes occasionally. Costco usualy sells bell peppers in packs of six.
When I buy bell peppers I use 3 and then have 3 leftover, I try to find recipes that use my leftover bell peppers.
This way they won’t go bad and I am not wasting money!
6. Save vs. Splurge
Another skill many homemakers have is when to save on the cost of something or splurge on it .
This may be for a wide variety of products. This could be for the quality of your produce or meat.
It could also be on specific clothing items for your family. Like winter clothes, snow clothing, athletic clothing.
These are items you might splurge on because of the health benefits of higher qualtiy foods or higher quality clothing that lasts longer.
For us, we tend to splurge on two things, tech and toys. We invest in higher quality toys for our daughter so they will last with other kids in the future.
We also invest in higher quality tech to help us get work done faster to spend more time with our family.
In this area, do your research and understand where to save and splurge!
7. Basic Meal Cooking
The seventh item is knowing a basic number of meals and basic cooking skills.
This could be things like how to cook eggs, how to make a roux, and how to cook a handful on meals can save time and stress!
For example, having 15 easy and liked meals by your family that you can make and have most of the items on hand for at all times will make busy nights easier.
We love broccoli beef, we usually have ground beef, the seasonings, rice, and frozen brocolli on hand at all times.
This recipe takes about 30-45 mins for me to make start to finish. This is on our regular roations meal list.
I encourage you to keep physical list of recipes like this and post it somewhere. Growing up my mom had this posted on the inside of our pantry 😂.
Bonus points: I keep this like a book list. I have the tried and true recipes, and a list of to be tried. This helps keep my skills up to snuf and growing, while also allowing room for busy or slow weeks.
I plan accoringly!
8. Basic Sewing/Mending Skills
Number eight is basic sewing and mending skills. The number of times I’ve had to sew a button on my husbands shirt is countless!
This isn’t a skill I learned until I was married and can easily be learned on youtube!
We were really young students going through bachelors and grad school in our early years of marriage.
We would trade off who would work full time to support the other through school.
There wasn’t a lot of cash running during those years. So we needed to save money where we could.
If his shirt was missing a few buttons, or my skirt needed mending or hemming I would learn to do it and save on getting it fixed or on getting a new one.
It can be a little daunting to do, but practice makes progress!
9. When to take a break
Number nine is knowing when to take a break!
Homemaking can be really overwhelming and when you start on one project you might find 5 more that you want to jump into.
It can really take a toll on your health physical and mental.
One thing that has really helped me is knowing that there is time for everything, but everything doesn’t need to be now.
Of course there is shuffling kids to practice and doctors appointments or going grocery shopping. Things that are vital.
However, painting your entire house and making three homemade meals and fixing everything on your list does not need to happen all in one day.
It can be done little by little.
10. Activities for the kids
Number ten is for those who have kiddos, take care of kiddos, or have neices or nephews over a lot.
This is activities for the kids as homemaking skills! Each child is such a blessing and is very unique in personality.
Some kids are great with downtime and being bored. Other kids need structure and activities.
We have a two year old who is very active and loves to play! We are constantly going outside and playing. We swim, walk, play at the park when we have some nice weather.
Other days we play with rainbow rice, playdough, do coloring or do some solo play time with toys.
If my little one is looking for an activity I will usually find something we can connect together with and then give her some solo time when she is deep into whatever it is!
Protip: One of the best peices of toddler advice I’ve been given is the ‘is it worth it?’ test.
Take your activity and ask the questions “Will it keep their attention for more than 15 minutes?” and “Is clean up less than 10 minutes?” if the answer is yes to both then go for the activity!
Don’t forget to have the kids help set up and clean up.
11. Budgeting/Goal Planning
Finally we’ve made it to budgeting and goal planning as homemaking skills. These can be two different skills, but I wanted to bring them together because they are so complimentary.
Budgeting is more than just creating a restriction for your money.
When created with goals in mind it helps you reach your goals that you want to acheive.
These goals could be to retire earlier, or buy that home on land that you’ve been dreaming of!
Get creative with your money and how you make money!
Take advantage of employer sponsered investment opportunities if you can!
Conclusion
I hope you found this list helpful!
These are some of the homemaking skills I have been working on over many years to make my homelife as relaxing and as comfortable as possible!
