A few tips on housecleaning, some gleaned from Mom

Homeowners have a love-hate relationship with housecleaning, according to a recent survey by Vileda, maker of disposable gloves. We love the end result but hate the chore.

About 40 percent of the survey respondents said they clean weekly. That group outnumbered the 37 percent who clean twice weekly or daily. The rest wait until the dust bunnies threaten to take over.

Asked to choose their favorite housecleaning chores, men chose vacuuming. Women chose the laundry. But they agreed on the least-favorite chore: cleaning the bathroom.

Where do we learn our housekeeping skills?

"From my Mom," said half of the respondents. The other half learned from experience.

Men were far more likely to say they picked up cleaning tips from their spouses than were women.

Despite all the nifty, new floor-cleaning products on the market, the survey said 71 percent of homeowners said they prefer using the old-fashioned wet mop or getting on their hands and knees and using a wet cloth.

Asked to name their housecleaner role models, Alice from "The Brady Bunch" made a clean sweep, with Florence from "The Jeffersons" and Niles from "The Nanny" running a close second and third.

Another survey favorite was the Jetsons' wisecracking robotic maid, voiced by Jean Vander Pyl, who doubled as the voice of Wilma Flintstone.

Q. Who is this perennial favorite, who cleans on through rerun eternity?

Answer next Saturday in New Homes

Last week's question

If you think Chicago street addresses are confusing, imagine how baffling they were before 1909.

Then, under what historians call the "old numbering system," the fork in the Chicago River divided the city into three divisions, according to Don Hayner and Tom McNamee in their book, "Streetwise Chicago: A History of Chicago Street Names."

The main channel of the river defined the north-south line, while the South Branch and North Branch were the east-west lines.

In 1909, a Good Samaritan came to the rescue. To the city council, this employee of Lyon & Healy proposed a system using two main drags, Madison Street and State Street, as the north-south and east-west lines.

The corner of State and Madison became Ground Zero, so to speak, with the addresses ascending from there.

To honor this man, the city named a two-block long street on the Southeast Side after him.

Q. Who is this man, to whom we owe this orderly system of streets?