Ask Sandra Phillips about her low-maintenance house, and the former home economics teacher from La Habra Heights, Calif., reaches for a very long list and begins to read.
Soon, you get caught up in her enthusiasm, and when she says, “I’m probably telling you more than you want to know,” you deny it at once and demand more.
There seem to be two roads to a house that will require little maintenance: One is to not clean regularly and overlook maintenance, thus freeing yourself of any responsibility for housework.
The neater solution lies with Phillips and several other homeowners across the country, who either have designed relative maintenance freedom into their houses or had their architects or builders take care of it.
And why? Well, as any residential builder can tell you, the modern American two-paycheck family with all the kids in school doesn’t have tons of time to spend on sandblasting great gobs of yuck and blech from walls, counters, kitchen floors and bathtub tile surrounds.
“I have four children ages 8 1/2 years to 4 months,” said Susan Kelly of Acworth, Ga., an Atlanta suburb. “There is no way I want to spend all my time cleaning.”
Phillips and Kelly are among the owners of low-maintenance houses around the country discovered by cleaning expert Don Aslett, who has written a book on the subject.
The move toward less maintenance is “not something that just happened,” said Kira McCarron, vice president for marketing at Toll Bros. in Huntingdon Valley, Pa., which builds luxury homes all over the country. “With concerns for time and time-economy growing as our lives have gotten busier, we’ve been designing ways to reduce the amount of time required for cleaning.”
The introduction of his-and-her vanities in the bathroom was an answer to the problem of two people needing to get ready for work at the same time, McCarron said. And development of multipurpose rooms–the “great room,” for example, was another answer to limit messes and cleanup to one large room–in theory, of course, for people with children.
Relative maintenance freedom appears to be equally important in so-called empty-nester housing.
“We do a number of things to free people from cleaning tasks,” said Martha Moyer, manager of community relations for Del Webb Corp. in Sun City, Ariz., which builds retirement communities around the country. “It’s just something we know about our buyer base. Retirees have more to do with their time than just clean house.”
Among the standard low-maintenance features of Del Webb houses are central vacuum systems, easy-to-clean paints and wall coverings, cultured marble or Corian countertops in kitchen and bath, low-maintenance landscaping, maintenance-free brick, stucco or stone exteriors and, in Southwestern houses, tile roofs, “which last forever,” Moyer said.
Not every builder is amenable to making the changes that typically slice hours from homeowners’ weekly cleaning schedules.
“We did what we could,” said Kelly, whose husband, John, shares cleaning duties with her. “Our builder wasn’t really into customizing our house, but he let us make a few changes.”
Among them were bathroom and kitchen fixtures “without cracks and crevices, so they were easier to clean and more sanitary,” Susan Kelly said. They also chose kitchen cabinets that rose to the ceiling because “the tops of lower cabinets are gathering places for dust and clutter,” she said.
Many builders in the Philadelphia area are eager to accommodate requests for low-maintenance items.
“We do it all the time,” said Edward J. Deischer, sales and marketing director of the Iacobucci Organization of Havertown, which builds houses in the Philadelphia area.
“We encourage our buyers to work with the subcontractors–the electricians, plumbers, carpet installers–to obtain these kinds of upgraded items. It’s good business for everyone.”
Many products to make maintenance easier have been around for years: self-cleaning ovens, no-wax vinyl flooring, closet organizers, earth-colored tile, eggshell enamel paint–just to name a few. Other features are newer.
“Corian countertops are virtually indestructible,” said the Toll Bros.’ McCarron. “If you put a hot pot on them, nothing happens.”
Swanstone is another solid countertop material that is as durable as the more expensive granite that it mimics. Solid countertops such as Corian, Swanstone and marble, for example, don’t have the cracks and crevices of laminate and tile that can hold dirt, nor will they stain as easily as butcher-block.
The watchword in the kitchen is efficiency–not only countertops, but innovative storage that helps reduce clutter and frees counterspace, according to kitchen designers.
Floors take the hardest wear, in the opinion of many. And opinions are divided on the merits of using ceramic-tile flooring.
“I have hardwood floors in my kitchen, and they pretty much take care of themselves,” McCarron said. “I used to have white-tile floors and you’d only have to look at them and you’d have to clean them.”
According to Moyer, “We consider tile easier to clean than carpeting, so a great room of one of our houses typically has a tile floor.”
Said Susan Kelly: “We wanted ceramic tile, but decided it was too expensive. So we installed vinyl flooring–the rolls, not the individual tiles. Then we spoke to friends of ours in California, who told us horror stories about cleaning tile, so we were glad we didn’t use tile.
“Our vinyl floors also are white, but, surprisingly, aren’t that difficult to keep clean,” she said.
Colleen Meigs, whose Tucson, Ariz., house recently was restored on eight episodes of public television’s “This Old House,” had several hundred square feet of Mexican floor tile torn out of her house, replacing it with scored red concrete in the Southwestern style.
“There would be dusty footprints on the tile every time someone walked in from the courtyard,” said builder John McCaleb, who was the contractor for the renovation project.
Cleaning expert Aslett, who with his daughter Laura Aslett Simons has written “Make Your House Do the Housework” (Better Way Books, $14.99), is installing plenty of tile in his maintenance-free house in Hawaii.
“But I picked out tile that had some of this area’s red-colored soil in it so it won’t show the dirt,” Aslett said.
“Too much tile is installed with quarter-inch grout lines,” he said. “When the grout dries, it is deep enough to hold dirt and tiny things. That’s why when I install tile, I go with narrow 3/16th-inch joints between the tiles, because you cut down on dirt accumulation.”
When Aslett buys carpeting for his houses, he picks up eight to 10 samples, wets them, and puts soil on each of them. The one that shows the dirt least is the one he buys.
“Dirt shows up twice as dark on carpets, and twice as light on walls,” Aslett said.
Ever use a sensor-activated bathroom faucet and a wall-mounted hand dryer in an airport restroom?
Well, former teacher Phillips has installed both in what she calls “our `magic or no-hands bathroom.’ “
“We needed a bathroom next to the kitchen so everybody could wash their hands before dinner after playing out of doors,” said Phillips, the mother of seven boys and a girl, whose husband, Reed, is president of Los Angeles College of Chiropractic in Whittier.
By making the faucet sensor-activated, Phillips reduced the number of times the sink would have to be cleaned. The hand-dryer obviously eliminated the need for paper towels and kept dirty hand towels to a minimum.
“They were slightly more expensive to install, but the amount of use they’ve gotten in the eight years we’ve lived here has made the investment worth it,” Phillips said.
McCarron said that in most houses, the mud room inside the back door serves as “the place you can hose down the kids so they won’t track the outside into the rest of the house.
“That certainly reduces the time and scope of cleaning up,” she said.
Another high-maintenance area for many homeowners is around the base of a pedestal toilet.
“I asked my builder if it was possible to install wall-mounted toilets,” Phillips said. “He said that unless he could sink the brackets into the concrete foundation and bolt it in, the toilets would eventually be rocked back and forth off the wall.”
“But he did it, and it has been a life saver,” she said. “Often, all you need to do is ask.”
So all the toilets on the ground level are wall-mounted. The toilets in the upstairs bathrooms have pedestal bases, and the boys are responsible for making sure they are cleaned.
Phillips also has a central vacuum cleaner system, which, according to Aslett, is a fixture in 72 percent of all Canadian homes but only 3 percent of homes in the United States.
“These are the best things in the world,” Aslett said. “Too many people fail to install openings at regular intervals in their houses, so they have these 36-foot hoses skinning up the house as they drag them along.
“The openings only cost $4 or $5 each,” he said. “All you really need is a 15-foot hose.”
A number of builders offer central vacuum systems as an option–among them DeFeo, Calton and Matrix Development, Orleans and, in some of its developments, Pulte.
Another innovation in cleanup is the sweep-in baseboard–featuring holes about four-inches-square with a trap door that, when opened, sucks in debris that you sweep in front of it. “You’ll never need a dustpan again,” Aslett said.
Dirty clothes play a major role in the day-to-day life of a house, and the location and design of the laundry room can help reduce the amount of time spent there.
“Some people want it on the first floor and have a chute to send the laundry down to it,” McCarron said. “Others want it on the second floor, near the bedrooms, so they won’t have to carry it around the house.”
Susan Kelly lives in a 1,650-square-foot raised ranch, “and there was no way we were going to put the washer and dryer in the basement.”
Even though the Kellys have four children, they do laundry only once a week.
Phillips said she spent as much time designing her laundry room as she spent on the kitchen of her 5,500-square-foot, 8-year-old house.
“The most efficient design for a kitchen is a U-shape, so I made the laundry U-shaped, too,” Phillips said. “The whole process of doing laundry is really similar to food preparation.”
Clothes drop into large plastic cans from chutes that originate on the second floor. The clothes are presorted, and the ones with stains go to a utility sink for treatment.
Then come the washer, dryer and a table for folding the clothes, which are then placed in bins marked with the names of each family member. There is a rod for hanging permanent-press clothing and a foldout ironing board for touch-ups.
The Phillips’ house features built-ins wherever possible, including headboards in the master bedroom that hide a typical end-table mess. Lights, security system, telephones and tissues are concealed behind lift-up doors.
The chandelier in the entry is “essentially maintenance-free with smoke-colored, vertical prisms that require little or no dusting, but allow the light to filter easily through,” Phillips said.
It may seem a lot easier to build low maintenance into a new house than work it in after the fact, but Aslett said it isn’t necessarily so.
“Remember, 80 percent of items in your house that require high levels of maintenance are rollover items,” he said–light fixtures, carpets, drapes and paint, among them. “These usually need to be replaced every 10 years.
“So when you redo them, think low-maintenance,” he said. “Even if you do just one thing–changing round doorknobs to handles that don’t require a full dirty handprint to use–it will bless your life forever.”
