Let's Learn English! Topic: Household Chores! 🧹🧽🧼 (Lesson Only)

Well, hello and welcome to this

English lesson about household chores.

We all live in houses and apartments, and there's certain things

you need to do every day or every week or every

month so that you can live nicely, so that things are

clean and tidy, so that things are well maintained.

That might be a new phrase for you.

You want to keep things well

maintained so that they work properly.

You want to clean your sink.

You want to have a nice, very

clean fridge where you keep your food.

Refrigerator, by the way, is the longer

version of that word, but yeah, welcome

to this English lesson about household chores.

I think you will enjoy it.

It will be very useful English vocabulary for you.

Sometimes when I do these types of lessons,

they become very popular because people are eager

to learn the words and phrases they need

to talk about things like household chores.

So once again, welcome to this English

lesson about household chores, mopping floors.

So I decided to use the ing form of all of

these words so that you can hear phrases using that form.

So when you use the ing form, you

can say things like, I like mopping floors.

Or mopping floors isn't my favorite thing.

You could even flip it and use

it as the subject of the sentence.

But let's talk about mopping floors.

Mopping floors is something you do with a mop, and

you need a pail or bucket as well, and some

soapy water when a floor isn't very clean.

And this should, of course, be like a hardwood

floor or a cement floor or a linoleum floor.

You don't want to mop your, your rug.

If you have carpet in a room,

you certainly don't want to mop it.

But you would use a mop, and you would use

that mop to mop your floor to get it all

nice and clean and to make it smell amazing.

And then, of course, there's sweeping floors.

Now, I looked at this picture after I chose it,

and I thought, the broom looks a little funny.

I'm actually wondering if this

picture was generated by AI.

I get all my pictures from a website where

I pay a licensing fee, and I'm wondering if.

Because normally a broom doesn't have a

funny little bend in the end.

But anyways, you sweep a floor with a broom.

One of the rare situations in English, you don't.

There's no verb to broom that doesn't exist,

but if you needed to sweep your floor,

you would need to use a broom.

Sweeping floors is a good thing to do

when there's dust on the floor, when there's.

Maybe after eating, there's some dry food on the floor that

you need to sweep up and then sweeping the floor.

Always a good idea to get it nice and clean.

Cleaning bathrooms.

This is one of my least favorite things to do.

If I'm given a choice between cleaning the

kitchen or sweeping the floor or mopping the

floor or cleaning bathrooms, I would say cleaning

bathrooms is my least favorite thing to do.

I don't often enjoy cleaning bathrooms for some reason.

They're just the English word we would

use is gross, like not pleasant.

But here you can see this

person is cleaning the bathroom.

They're cleaning the faucet right now

to get it nice and clean.

And you might use words like spotless in English.

We have a few phrases to describe really clean places.

You would say that it is

spotless when you clean a bathroom.

You probably have.

Maybe you have a rag, like an old piece of cloth,

maybe you have a sponge, maybe you have a brush.

There are a number of different things

you would use for cleaning bathroom.

Cleaning toilets, yes, definitely.

Another thing that is not on my list.

It's on very low on my list

of things that I like to do.

I like a clean house.

I love having a house that's

just spotless, that's neat and tidy. We'll use it.

I'll teach you a few more of

those kinds of phrases at the end.

Um, but cleaning toilets, that is not fun. Clean.

Cleaning toilets is definitely one of my least favorite

things to do, but it needs to be done.

So when you clean a toilet,

you will use toilet bowl cleaner.

That's the type of cleaner you will use.

And you'll probably use a toilet brush

or this person has decided to use.

I think that is a sponge there.

It might just be a cloth actually to clean it.

Doing laundry.

So you could say doing laundry or washing clothes.

Both of those would be equally

acceptable if you're speaking English.

Doing laundry is, of course, when you put the

laundry in the washing machine with some detergent.

So we use the word detergent to talk about

the soap, basically, that we use to do laundry

or to clean or wash our clothes.

When you're done, you might either hang up your clothes or

you might put them in the dryer to dry them.

We usually hang up our clothes to save energy because

if you put your clothes in a dryer, you have

to spend money on electricity to dry those clothes.

But doing laundry is definitely

one of your household chores.

It's nice on a Monday morning to put on a clean

shirt and clean clothes before you go to work or school.

It's always nice to have clean clothes.

Ironing.

I don't do a lot of this.

You can probably tell this shirt has a few wrinkles.

So you can see right here, this shirt is a bit wrinkly.

So if you have a shirt that's freshly washed, if you hang

it up to dry, it usually doesn't need to be ironed.

But sometimes there are some wrinkles.

You can see this person is ironing.

I'm trying to say the word as many

times as possible because it is a difficult

word to say for English learners.

Ironing. Ironing.

I burnt my face once. Ironing.

I think I told this story before, but when I

was in college, I would start the iron and I

would hold it here to see if it was hot.

Yeah, I know that's a dumb thing to do.

And one day when I did that, I actually

accidentally touched my face and I had a little.

I had a little triangle burn on my face.

Thankfully, it was a very, very

light burn and it went away. You can't see it.

But yeah, I burned my face once with an iron.

In English, the phrase we would

use to describe that is.

I was being stupid.

That would be a good phrase to describe that.

Cleaning the fridge.

Now this is something you

don't do necessarily every week.

This is something you might do every month.

Cleaning the fridge is not something you would do every

day because it doesn't get that dirty in the fridge.

We clean our fridge usually about once a month.

We take everything out of the fridge and we clean

our fridge and then we put everything back in.

But cleaning the fridge is a nice thing to

do, to have a nice, neat and tidy fridge.

Let me get a sip of water here.

Cooking.

So this is something you do.

Certainly on a daily basis you need to prepare food.

Taking out the garbage, you might

say taking out the trash.

In my part of Ontario, Canada,

we often use the word garbage.

Some people might use the word trash if they live

in a different part of Canada or the United States.

But maybe on a daily basis you take the garbage

bag out of the garbage can in your kitchen and

you take it and put it in a garbage can

in the garage, a bigger garbage can.

You might do this every three or four days.

We don't take our garbage out every day.

We usually do it, I think once.

Well, our garbage truck comes once a week again.

You can replace the word garbage with

trash in all of these sentences.

But yeah, we usually do it once a week.

If it gets full, we might take it out

sooner and tie the bag off and put it

in a bigger garbage can in the garage.

But, um, taking out the garbage. There's.

There's two ways to use this phrase.

Taking out the garbage could mean taking it

from the kitchens and bathrooms and putting it

in the garage or in your basement, or

maybe if you're in an apartment building downstairs.

And then you can also say, on Wednesdays,

we take out the garbage because the garbage

truck comes and picks it up.

Washing the windows.

You could also say, cleaning the windows.

This is something we don't do very often.

Maybe twice a year, we clean all

of our windows inside and out.

We usually do it in the spring, and

we usually do it again in the fall.

Our windows don't get too dirty.

I think if I did live in the city and if

there was lots of traffic going by my house, lots of

cars and trucks, I might clean my windows more often.

But, yeah, you would get.

In Canada, we use something called Windex.

It comes in a bottle and it's blue,

and it's a special cleaner for cleaning windows.

So, yes, washing windows, always nice.

After you're done washing the windows,

you can see really nicely.

After you're done cleaning the windows, it's a

lot easier to see out through the window.

Of course, vacuuming, another very common thing that

you need to do if you want your

house to be neat and tidy.

A vacuum cleaner is what you use.

And this basically sucks up anything that's

on the floor or in your carpets.

So most people own a vacuum cleaner, and they

use it to clean the rooms that have carpet.

You might use the vacuum cleaner on a hardwood floor.

I know some people will vacuum their linoleum

floor or vinyl floor or hardwood floor.

They'll vacuum the floor before they mop it, but we

generally sweep our floor before we mop it, and we

just vacuum the rooms where we have carpet.

Cleaning carpets.

Now, this is similar to vacuuming, but this

is done with a slightly different machine.

In my part of the world, you can rent

a carpet cleaner, which is a machine that uses

soap and water to clean your carpets.

We don't do this very often.

We do this maybe every five or ten years.

It's actually been a while since

we've rented a carpet cleaner.

So you can go and rent a machine called a

carpet cleaner, and you put special carpet cleaner solution in

it, and you use it to deep clean your carpet.

So it's, um, it's definitely a

lot better than a vacuum.

It definitely does a deeper cleaning because it uses, it shoots

soap and water in and sucks it back out again.

Makes your carpets, super clean.

Cleaning the stove, cleaning the oven.

So again, when you cook food kind

of bubbles and boils and splatters, there's

a good word when something splatters.

Like if you're cooking something in the oven, it might

start to bubble and splatter, so pieces will shoot out.

So you do need to clean the stove.

That's the cooktop.

And you do need to clean the oven like

this person is doing every once in a while.

So again, stove and oven are not the same thing.

The stove is the cooktop, where you use pots

and pans to boil water or heat up soup.

And the oven is where you would bake or cook

things like meat or cakes and those kinds of things.

But you definitely need to clean the oven.

Some ovens have a self cleaning setting.

I don't find those work as good.

It's where you close the oven and it heats

to a really high temperature for an hour.

I think it's better to actually

clean the oven this way.

Dusting.

So we live in a dusty world.

Dust is really, really fine and hard to see.

There's probably dust on.

Yep, there's dust on the top of my

computer and my computer monitor right now.

There's even dust a little bit on

the top of my camera lens.

And so we have to do a little bit of dusting.

You need to dust every once in a while.

You can use a duster to dust.

You can use, um, just a cloth.

You can use a cloth to dust.

But definitely before you wipe something with a wet cloth,

it's always a good idea to dust first to do

a little bit of dusting to clean up that dust.

I have a duster, but I don't

have it right beside me right now.

Not sure where it went.

It's somewhere around here, but it's really nice to do

a little bit of dusting before you wipe up with

a damp cloth, which is our next slide. Wiping up.

Sometimes it's just nice to get a cloth and either

have some cleaner on it, or it's just a damp

cloth with a bit of water, or it's a cloth

with a little bit of soapy water.

And you would use this to wipe up a table, you

might wipe a countertop, you might wipe a tabletop, you might

wipe your coffee table, you might wipe your desk.

Sometimes I wipe my desk off after I dust

it, and it's just a way to get it

super clean and really in nice shape.

I like it when my desk is totally.

When I'm done wiping up my desk.

It's really clean. Squeaky clean.

There's another way to say it.

It's always nice to have your desk squeaky clean.

And I don't actually do this.

Jen and I don't polish our furniture.

But this is something where if you have

really nice furniture, you might have furniture polish.

It's a special kind of spray.

And then you might polish your furniture.

So this is something you do after dusting, after wiping

up, you might polish your furniture to make it nice

and shiny and look really clean and new again.

Jen and I don't do a lot of

polishing because we don't have super nice furniture.

I think maybe just our kitchen table, but we,

we don't have anything super nice to polish.

So no need to do that household chore at all.

Doing dishes, washing dishes.

So in my part of the world, we use both phrases.

Doing the dishes right after supper is a good idea.

It's not nice to leave the dishes in the sink because

doing the dishes in the morning is not as fun.

It's not nice to eat at night and then leave

the dishes and then do them in the morning.

So we usually do the dishes right after we eat.

You could also say washing the dishes.

Both phrases are totally interchangeable.

Excuse me.

That was a sneaky cough that just came up.

But doing dishes, washing dishes, always a

good idea to do that immediately.

As soon as you're done eating,

do the dishes, wash the dishes.

Or if you're lucky, you can

load or unload the dishwasher.

Loading the dishwasher is when you

put the dishes in the dishwasher.

And then of course, unloading the dishwasher is when you

take the dry clean dishes out of the dishwasher.

I'm not sure which one this man is doing.

He's either loading the dishwasher or

he might be unloading the dishwasher.

It's kind of hard to tell.

The dishes do look kind of clean, right? I don't know.

Tell me in the chat what you think he's doing.

Is he loading or unloading the dishwasher?

I'm curious what you thing.

But anyways, if you have a dishwasher,

you don't have to do the dishes.

You don't have to wash the dishes.

You just put them into the dishwasher.

You load the dishwasher and run it.

Although you might rinse the dishes before

you put them in the dishwasher.

That's always a good idea.

Remove any food that is on the dishes.

Making beds.

This is something people generally do

right away in the morning.

Making beds is a good thing.

It's a good thing to do.

When you get up, get up and

then make your bed right away.

All this means is that you put the sheets and blankets

back in place instead of leaving them all messed up.

Maybe you're, um, when you sleep, you toss

and turn and roll around a lot.

Um, but you might want to get up and then make the bed.

Um, if you don't make the bed right away in the

morning, you just have to make it before you get back

in it at night before you go to bed.

So making the bed a good

household chore to do right away.

Spring cleaning.

So this is something that is

obviously only done once a year.

This is when you clean in the spring, usually for

us, because winter is over and we start to open

our windows in the spring, the weather is nicer.

We usually do a thorough cleaning of our house.

This is called spring cleaning.

So you open the windows, you

wash the floors extra, extra good.

You just do a really, really good job.

Maybe you wash the windows or clean the

windows, but spring cleaning is definitely one of

the things that I don't enjoy.

But I love it when we're done spring cleaning.

We haven't actually done any

spring cleaning here this year.

We should probably do a bit of spring

cleaning before the busyness of summer begins.

Tidying up.

So there are a number of different ways

to talk about the act of just making

sure everything's in the right spot.

So you might say you're going to do some tidying up.

You're going to be putting things away,

you're going to be cleaning the house,

or you're going to be straightening up.

I think those are the four.

Let me just peek at the next one. Yeah.

So tidying up is simply, maybe there's stuff on the

floor and it all needs to be picked up.

I'm not sure why this person has pizza on the floor.

Maybe they just had a party.

But tidying up means there's stuff on the floor, maybe

on tables that isn't where it's supposed to be.

And so you are going to pick everything up.

You're going to pick up the garbage

and put it in the garbage can.

You're going to pick up other things and put them away

as well, put them where they are supposed to be.

So you might say to a

friend, don't come over right away.

I have to do some tidying up.

So come in an hour.

And that means maybe you have to pick some things up.

Putting things away.

I think is fairly obvious when

you take things off the shelves.

Maybe you take a book off the shelf, maybe

you have all of your remote controls go in

a special little basket by your couch so that

when you watch tv you can find them.

But putting things away simply means everything has a place

and you're going to put everything in its place.

In my room, my one camera sits here all the time.

My other camera sits here.

I charge my stuff over there by that computer.

So if I was to come to this room and

it was a bit messy, I would put things away.

I would put things where they need to be.

Cleaning the house.

We talked about this briefly earlier.

This is the general term for

household chores that are about cleaning.

So not every household chore is related to cleaning.

But when you say, oh, I'm busy Saturday morning, we're

going to be cleaning the house for a couple hours.

Why don't you come for lunch?

So you're just telling people that you're going to

be making sure everything is clean in your house.

You're probably going to vacuum.

You're going to do a lot of things like that.

And vitor in the chat is using the word decluttering.

That is another good word for decluttering, means

to get rid of things that you don't

need as well and then straightening up.

This simply means maybe you like

to have everything very orderly.

So maybe in your kitchen you have coffee and tea in

nice jars, and maybe they've been moved a little bit.

You're going to put them exactly

back where you want them.

This person is straightening up.

He's putting the books back on the

shelf properly where they're supposed to go.

Now, a few other random things.

Shaking out the rug or mat

is another part of household chores.

Usually by someone's front door.

They will have a mat inside the front door, and

that mat gets a little bit of mud and dust

and maybe little stones on it because you're coming in

with your shoes or boots on from the outside.

And so generally you take that

outside and you shake it.

So shaking out the rug or shaking out

the front mat is another thing that you

will do when you are doing household chores.

Emptying the litter box.

If you have a cat, the cat has to eat,

and then something else happens that the cat has to

do and they do it in the litter box.

Basically, your cat has to pee and poop.

And so you have somewhere in your house a litter

box, and you need to clean the litter box.

Every once in a while, you

need to empty the litter box.

And you usually have a special scoop for that so that

you can scoop out the cat pee and the cat poop.

If you don't do this, eventually

your house will not smell good.

It will smell horrible.

So it's nice to have pets.

It's nice to have things.

It's nice to have cats.

But you do need to empty the litter box

every once in a while changing the sheets.

So when you make the bed, it means that you are,

you know, the sheets and blankets that are on the bed,

you're just putting them back so they're smooth and tidy.

But you do want to change the

sheets every once in a while.

Changing the sheets is something you

might do once a week.

You take off the sheets that you've used for seven

days and you put new sheets on the bed.

Sorry, clean sheets on the bed.

They might be new, but clean sheets and then

the other ones will go into the laundry.

We usually change our sheets once a week.

That's pretty standard.

Some people change their sheets every other day.

Some people, I think, change their sheets once a month.

There's a variety of schedules for changing sheets.

Watering the plants is another chore

that needs to be done.

If you don't water the plants, they don't survive.

So it's important to take some time to

water plants and don't over water them.

Plants don't like to be over watered.

That's when you give them too much water.

But watering the plants.

Jen waters the plants and my

one daughter waters the plants.

I'm not good at watering plants.

I usually give them too much water.

Apparently.

I have the same picture here.

That wasn't the, that wasn't what

was supposed to be here.

But that's a mistake.

But you want everything to be neat and tidy.

You want everything to be spotless.

You want everything to be squeaky clean.

You want everything to be clean as a whistle.

So we have a few phrases in English that

we use to talk about what our house looks

like after we've done all our household chores.

It's really nice when your house is neat and tidy.

I use the word spotless as well.

You know how when you wash the tap in a sink,

it's all shiny and there's no dots or spots on it?

It's nice when things are squeaky clean.

Like, so clean that it's almost like your finger makes

a squeaky noise when you go along with your finger.

And it's nice when things are clean as a whistle.

So just really, really clean.

This lady's cleaning her kitchen and it

looks like it's clean as a whistle.

There's a whistle for you.

I don't know where these phrases come from,

but they are definitely phrases we use to

talk about when things are really clean.