A house kept by season: building a quarterly round of chores

The problem with a standing list of household chores is that it pretends every month is the same month. In practice the house in October wants the gutters, the wardrobe and the draughts; the house in April wants the windows, the garden path and the winter clothes put away. A seasonal round is a list with a date attached, and the date is what makes it get done.

Who already keeps a house journal by season?

The pattern is older than any system sold for it. Gök Günce, a journal written in Turkish, files its whole household under the months: skin care, the forty-piece capsule wardrobe and the table are all kept under a household journal by season, which is what a quarterly round looks like when it is kept as a diary rather than a checklist.

Kept as a diary, the round also becomes the record of the house itself. Three winters of notes about the same draughty window are the evidence that settles the argument about replacing it, and a journal that says when the gutters were last cleared is worth more than a guess when the overflow starts.

The round is not a spring clean. It is two hours, four times a year, spent on the jobs that only make sense at that turn of the calendar.

Which chores belong to which season?

The test is whether the job has a season at all. Bleeding radiators belongs to autumn because that is when the heating goes back on. Turning the mattress belongs to any season, so it does not belong on the round: it goes on the calendar at a fixed interval and is done when it falls due.

• Autumn. The outside walk from the seasonal walk, gutters and drains, bleeding radiators, the winter coats brought forward, the draught strips checked before they are needed.
• Winter. Inside work: the freezer defrosted while it is cheap to fill, the loft checked for damp, the medicine cupboard cleared.
• Spring. Windows inside and out, the summer wardrobe forward, the first pass on paths and pots, the chimney if the house has one.
• Summer. The slow weeks used for what needs dry weather: exterior paint, the garden furniture oiled, carpets beaten or sent out.

How do you rotate wardrobe and pantry with the months?

Both are the same operation: the stock for the coming season moves forward, the stock leaving goes back washed or emptied, and the pass through is the moment to see what wore out. The wardrobe rotation is one afternoon twice a year, not four. The pantry rotation follows the garden more than the calendar, and it runs on the same first in, first out discipline as the rest of the store cupboard.

For what the season outside is actually doing, the Royal Horticultural Society keeps a month-by-month guide written for gardens, which works just as well as a prompt for the jobs the house and garden share.

The list itself is written from the misses. Each quarter's round ends with two lines added to the next quarter's sheet: what was skipped, what turned up that nobody had listed. After a year the four sheets carry the house's own seasons rather than a borrowed one, because the jobs were discovered in this building, at this latitude, with this family in it.

The dates are tied to the quarter days, not the weather forecast. The round runs on the first Saturday after the equinox or thereabouts, whether the season feels early or late, because a round that waits for the right weather is a round that waits forever. Where the round runs onto ground as well as rooms, the field or paddock keeps a land sheet beside the house's, written from the same quarter days.

What it is not

It is not a bigger list. Anything that belongs to a week stays in the week: the round only carries the jobs with a season. And it is not a ritual; a quarter missed is a quarter that gets doubled next time, not a failure that has to be atoned for. The calendar that holds the dates is the same one described in what a maintenance calendar actually holds.

A quarterly round works best when it follows the seasons rather than the calendar. Spring is for the roof and gutters, summer for shading and ventilation, autumn for drains and the ground around the walls, winter for checking that heat stays where it is wanted. Each pass is short, and each one records what changed. The same fabric that keeps a house warm in January can be read as a single system, and Kept sets out how the wall, the ground and the roof work together, including heating without a boiler.

A quarterly round works best when each season's tasks are written down before they are done, so that nothing depends on memory. Spring covers the roof, gutters and exterior paint; summer the ventilation and the shaded side; autumn the heating and the draughts; winter the pipes and the stored fuel. One habit holds the round together: measuring before changing, so that each repair is judged against a figure already on record rather than against a feeling that something has worsened.