Ah! There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.
—Jane Austen, Emma
I’m known both as the Laundry Evangelist and the Laundry Guy, but my love of home reaches far beyond the laundry room. I’ve been enthralled by homes since childhood—and especially since my parents allowed the teenage me to choose my bedroom décor—toasty brown painted walls, a mallard duck wallpaper border (it was the ’80s, after all), and hunter-green carpet.
Having been empowered to make those decisions, I’d go on to personalize every home I’d live in, including my first cozy (read: tiny) apartment in a former 1920s mansion in Lexington, Kentucky, and my current historic brownstone in St. Paul, Minnesota. Each presented new opportunities to create home.
Especially fun in my twenties and thirties—even today, honestly—was rising above any budget challenges by breaking rules: Using coat hooks as a tie rack, a lion door knocker as a towel ring, and a kitchen table as a nightstand. Making curtains out of a remnant of twill from a discount store. Screwing stylish gold finials into a cheap metal pipe spray-painted black. Keeping my kitchen utensils in a flowerpot. I swear: Armed with a curtain rod, brown kraft paper, and grosgrain ribbon, I could conquer the world.
Plus, I love—truly love!—cleaning my home. My cleaning credo is similar to the gospel I share regarding laundry: Doing laundry is a privilege and a task you do for those you love, including yourself. Similarly, I aim to always be grateful for a place to lay my head. Not everyone is so lucky. And so it’s a blessing and a privilege to be able to have a home to clean and to keep in good repair. Plus, I’m physically able to clean my home. That’s also not true for everyone.
For many years now, I’ve stocked Mona Williams, my store at Mall of America, with vintage fashion and all the laundry items needed to take good care of textiles, but also with home décor, holiday ornaments, and much more, including all-purpose natural cleaners, handcrafted brooms and brushes, and other traditional and modern home-cleaning tools.
When Laundry Campers attend my popular two-hour classes—complete with domestic science, demos, know-how, philosophy, and a humorous story or three—they often spot these items and ask for more information. Many attendees are surprised to head home with not only laundry advice and gear but also great products and ideas for renewing their homes quickly and easily in a morning or an afternoon. And their interest in these items has grown recently.
These days we’re spending more time than ever in our homes—for many of us, our personal lives and our work lives now overlap. It’s like a throwback to medieval times when serfs lived and worked in their thatched-roof homes—their rooms serving myriad functions. A bedroom, for example, was for sleeping, working, reading, socializing, and more. These days, the same can be said of nearly any space in our homes. The kitchen becomes homework central. The den morphs into the laundry room as you fold clothes while watching The Golden Girls. (Did you know the average sofa can hold the clothes from nine laundry baskets?) And the laundry room does double duty as a yoga studio. We’re looking at our homes with fresh eyes and seeking new ways to revamp our spaces.
In the pages that follow, we’ll delve into every space in your house as I offer novel hacks to clean your home, save money, and be good to the environment; countless ways to freshen up your spaces and elevate your everyday living; and stories to inspire you and perhaps make you laugh.
Each chapter begins with a story or two to inspire your own home design, followed by lots of ideas to refresh your living spaces, and then easy, inexpensive, and often fun how-to instructions for deep cleaning. I conclude each chapter with a get-the-job-done ten-minute clean—complete with a music playlist to clean by.
Throughout the book, you’ll find lots of how-to sidebars (like a dozen ways to refresh your living room and three tools to splurge on to make cleaning more effective) plus practical and sometimes surprising tips to make your life easier. And couldn’t we all use that?!
As a kid, I was introduced to home-keeping and home décor. As an adult, I’m thankful for my wonderful home and the opportunity to create a space I love to live in. With this book, I’m honored to share my love of home with you.