Household chores! There was no refrigeration or tap water back then. Nor electricity to heat/cool your home. If you wanted to eat, drink, or be warm you had to do it yourself. In the morning you might start with someone being assigned to re-stoke the kitchen stove and get the place warm. This would probably be one of the kids responsibilities. Everyone had to empty their own pee bottle or toilet bowl. Preferably outside, away from the cabin. Someone would have to keep the water pitcher filled and the nearby bowl empty. And water! A well with a pump handle was a high tech piece of equipment back then, especially on the frontier. Someone, usually the women, would have to go down to the creek, fill the bucket with water, then haul it back to the house, arthritis or not. They were still doing that when Lyndon Johnson first got into politics in Texas. People had pride in themselves and their family, and they had to make a good showing. Women, or if a man was single, maybe himself, would use the sad irons to press the shirt. After the stove was warmed up three or four sad irons would be placed on top at the hottest location. Once heated they were used to iron shirts. When cooled, they were returned to the stove and the next one was used. This is where the verb 'iron' comes from.
The outhouse: technology here varied. My grandmother's outhouse used a bucket. She paid a man to come once a week and empty it. Such a convenience would not be available on the 1860's frontier. Instead, every few months the outhouse would be moved and placed over a newly dug hole.
Food was mostly hunting, fishing, jerking and canning. Jerking (along with smoking) dehydrates meat so it can be stored without spoiling without using refrigeration. There might be a smoke house if they were wealthy. The fire in it would need to be maintained, too.
All this fire means someone is gathering firewood or other burnables, such as coal. It needs to be located, cut down, dragged back, sawed or chopped, split, stacked, and dried before it can be used. To get through a winter you must have, during the warm season, have collected and stacked enough wood to get you through. That means from spring to fall you are replenishing what you used during the winter. You would probably need 10 to 20 cords of wood to frugally get you through the winter.
Clothing: what are you gonna wear? Store-bought clothes required cash, something in short supply on the frontier especially. If you shot a rabbit to eat, you saved the skin, tanned it and prepared it for a piece of clothing. You could also weave and possibly spin fabric to make your own pants and shirts. To do that you need a source of fiber, probably gotten from the flax you grew in your growing area. Of course, you have to harvest the seed first, the harvest the plant stalks, dry them, process them then make them into long fibers so to weave.
I could go on. I would say that, especially on the frontier, life was probably 90% maintence
Hope this helps.
Regards,
DrDoc