I can't imagine what my house would look like if it weren't for the month of January. Since the beginning of the New Year, I have:

• Reorganized the linen closet

• Washed and ironed curtains

• Painted our home's entrance way, hallway, and stairwell

• Picked yellow wallpaper backing from the space between the kitchen cupboards and the countertop (I stripped the wallpaper last January, but the stubborn backing stuck to the wall)

• Pried a year's worth of crud from the stovetop.

Already my hands are dried and cracked, and all the scrubbing and painting has aggravated the tendonitis in my elbows. Yet I persist, because once the darker days of winter have passed, household projects somehow get put on hold.

Each year, after the Christmas tree is taken down and the holiday decorations are packed away, there is a brief window of opportunity when I can coerce my husband, Steve, into doing house projects — like cleaning out the mud room and organizing overstuffed closets — before warmer weather lures him to the garage, where he prefers to do his own thing, like re-jetting the carburetor on his '67 Mini Cooper or replacing the brakes on the '51 Ferguson tractor.

But, with a firm reminder that this is his house, too, I can usually get four to six weeks of quasi-cooperation this time of year.

The first job I tackled was the linen closet. When I tried to stuff the new bath towels I got for Christmas into the closet, a stack of wash clothes tumbled out. Within minutes, I had emptied the closet's contents and began sorting and tossing. Old tablecloths that had been replaced by placemats more than a dozen years ago were the first to go, and the peach and green bath towels I had been saving for when my children set up housekeeping on their own were carried off by my husband, who will use them as shop rags in his garage. (See, I told you he was cooperative.)

The next day, when I swatted a lazy winter fly from a fold in the bedroom curtain, a swirling dust cloud left me gasping for air. So, all the curtains came down: kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and office. After I washed and ironed them, it was Steve's job to re-hang them. But when he put the kitchen curtains in our bedroom and the bedroom curtains in the office, I began to worry. (Was his cooperation waning, I wondered. Certainly he knew which curtains went where.)

Next came the painting. Steve helped by masking the carpet and removing the hardware and light fixtures; my job was to try to cover a decade's worth of scuff marks and dirt with a creamy peach-colored paint. The project took four days, and as it progressed, I noticed that Steve's trips to the garage to get a screwdriver or refill my paint container took longer and longer.

Only three weeks into my January cleaning season and it's not looking good. I have so much more that I want to do before Steve retreats to his garage. Before long he'll be asking me to come out and help him replace the Fergy brakes or re-jet the Mini's carburetor, whatever that means.

Linda K. Schmitmeyer is a freelance writer living in Middlesex Township. Her e-mail address is lks260@zoominternet.net.