Sweeping Changes

Let’s face it, housekeeping is no fun. But keeping house is. The difference is plain and simple: One is about drudgery and chores, the other about home and hearth--creating an ambience of comfort for family and friends.

If perception is reality, then Cheryl Mendelson is on to something.

“Here I had been working 70- to 80-hour weeks and eating Chinese food standing up over the sink,” the New York lawyer said. “It was a disgusting life in many ways. It was a life that left you hungry in every way. I said, ‘I’m not going to do this anymore.’ ”

She realized that she was using her home as a pit stop--just a place to sleep, shower and change clothes. This was home?

Well, it certainly provided an idea for a book--an 884-page, 3 1/2-pound “Home Comforts, the Art & Science of Keeping House.” Thousands are shelling out $35 for Mendelson’s no-nonsense reference book, which is in its seventh printing since its publication in November.

“It’s really been amazing to watch this book sell,” said Beth Wareham, a spokeswoman for publisher Scribner, which has printed 160,000 copies. Sales of general how-to books are considered great if 20,000 to 40,000 are sold.

Lupe Simpson, whose grandmother taught her how to cook, iron and fold laundry as training to be a housewife, now consults “Home Comforts” when she irons, faces a tough stain or wants to air out bedding.

“I saw ‘Home Comforts’ on a Martha Stewart show, and I was like, ‘I need this book,’ ” said Simpson, in her 50s, an administrator with the Los Angeles Unified School District. She felt her Santa Monica home needed some tender loving care. “It just tells you everything--how to feel good, how to care for yourself, how to clean your house,” she said.

Household how-to books are as common as dish towels. The first comprehensive book was “Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management,” first published in 1861. There has been an endless supply of books since then. They’ve mutated into themes like how to organize, de-clutter or achieve positive energy through feng shui.

After 40 years, syndicated columnist Heloise is still giving household tips in newspapers magazines and paperbacks. Now, omni-Martha (as in Stewart) has blanketed TV, books and magazines with her slick brand of home arts. Few, however, have approached keeping house with such thoroughness and seriousness--no color pictures, just black-and-white line drawings--as Mendelson. She is sweeping into homes like a Dirt Devil. Where Mrs. Beeton left off with tips on the footman and coachman, Mendelson picks up with tips on maintaining the floppy disk and computer.

Mendelson, 53, a lawyer, wife and mother, believes her book appeals to others who share the feelings she experienced during her Chinese food epiphany. They, too, want to spend more time at home and in comfort.

A movement back to home is among the top 10 trends forecast for the millennium, according to Gerald Celente, author of “Trends 2000” (Warner Books) and director of the Trends Research Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y.

“At the end of the 20th century, home is where you hung your hat between commuting, but now this is the place where the spirit resides because of the Internet revolution and telecommuting. The home is going to become the general headquarters for the family,” Celente said.

“A lot of people don’t know what to do to take care of the home. Now most women and men have not been trained to do any of this,” he added. “For the movement and focus back on the home without having the fundamental knowledge, this is the perfect book. And it’s not like everybody is going to do everything in the book.”

Rekindling of interest in home comes at a time when many baby boomers, especially women, are discovering home in a different way. During the women’s movement in the 1970s, housekeeping was as good as a dirty word, something to be swept under the carpet. Women did not want to mention “housecleaning” in the same breath as “career” lest they not be taken seriously at the work place. Mendelson, herself one of these women, now believes it’s all right to be interested in keeping house.

It’s not only women but the entire family who can take pride in working together to maintain the home. Myron Orleans, a professor of sociology and resident futurist at Cal State Fullerton, said, “If you hire all your functions out, you may get a clean, orderly home, but you don’t have the experience of collaborating and sharing the homemaking.”

Mendelson’s use of the words of “art and science of keeping house” gives a high-toned cachet to the age-old, mundane tasks.

“Housekeeping, believe it or not, is complicated,” the author said. “And there’s a lot of knowledge involved. You have to keep up to date. You have to understand nutrition, a little bit of chemistry and juggle six balls at once. Because some women have heard nothing but contempt and put-downs [about keeping house] and they’ve never really seen anyone making home ‘homey’ where things buzz along nicely, they just don’t know the pleasures and comforts of this.”

Anne Edkins of Pasadena unhesitatingly describes herself as someone who is very domestic. The 30-something, assistant book buyer likes to garden and wants a comfortable home. She snapped up “Home Comforts” the first very day it hit the shelves because she and her husband are first-time home buyers.

“I saw my mom do housework,” Edkins said, “But a lot of people who had working mothers didn’t learn firsthand how to do things or at least didn’t get to see them do it. If I have a question, I can go to that book and find the answer.”

She turned to the book for her question about taking care of the tile flooring in her new home. When she mopped before she had the book, her floors were streaky with dirty corners. After consulting the book, she replaced the shaggy mop with a sponge one, mixed her own cleaning solution and liked the results much better.

“For the tile, I put white vinegar in the water,” she said. “It looks a lot better than it did.”

Moreover, when a friend mentioned that she couldn’t get her underwear as clean in California as she could in Georgia, Edkins shared the section on “bluing.” This whitening process, which is an option to bleach, involves adding a colorant to the wash water to remove yellow tinge in white clothes. It evidently worked because the friend didn’t call back--at least not about dingy undergarments.

There’s no way of tracking whether the book’s readers are actually applying what they are learning or simply reading it for pleasure. Some, like Simpson, do both.

She doesn’t usually iron, for example, but now she presses both sides of cloth table napkins. At other times, she just reads the book, which sits between a cookbook and an American Red Cross first aid book on a kitchen shelf, aloud to her family to inspire them to help with household duties.

She read the sections on laundry to her 15-year-old son, Derek, to get him to sort his clothes and do his own laundry.

Derek, who’s busy with homework, sports, and studying for the SATs, would rather spend time playing games on a computer in his bedroom than tackle the laundry on the floor.

So his mother read aloud Chapter 27--”Sanitizing the Laundry” about dust mites, lice, nits, fleas and infectious microorganisms.

“Tide and bleach will do it,” Derek told his mom.

Then he did his laundry.

Candace A. Wedlan can be reached at candace.wedlan@latimes.com.

Do not lift the broom off the floor at the end of a stroke or you will fling dust and dirt into the air.

To remove spray starch, apply a paste of baking soda and water with an old toothbrush.

Sponges that are used to clean bathrooms should be soaked afterward in bleach and water.

Spray pumps containing homemade cleaning solutions pollute the air less than aerosols.