Putting my Cleaning Schedule to use :)

Posted by Whitney on Dec 4, 2011 in DIY, For the Home | 12 comments

If you haven’t read my Cleaning Schedule Post you should go have a look. I put the schedule together in the hopes that I would finally find a way to get a handle on keeping my house clean. You would think that, with Hubby and I both staying home all the time, we would be able to keep a clean house. That would be a completely incorrect assumption. I think being home all the time actually makes it worse because we are always here to eat, work, play, cook, etc. Yes we have time to clean, but we also have plenty of time to mess it up and since we are always home there is always the excuse that we can just do it later. Combined with the fact that we also have 3 children that are here most of the time….our house is always a mess and I hate it. Now that we have moved into a bigger house I have committed to keeping it cleaned up. Of course I require that everyone pitch in because I will get burnt out if I have to do it all myself.

The next issue that I needed to address is how to display said schedule. I didn’t just want to put it on the fridge where it would eventually fall down or get covered by an art project or certificate of achievement. No I knew that it needed to be displayed proudly on the wall in a way that would show it’s importance, yet still look great. Since I have this great empty wall space in the kitchen I decided that would be home for my schedule. I decided to make that wall the family command center where we would post menus, to-dos and other important items. Now to make it look stylish.

I knew I wanted to frame the schedule under glass so I could use it as a dry erase board. Originally I thought I would just design a large format print and send it off to my print company. The problem I had with that was, I had no idea how to design something that would fit the decor in my kitchen since we currently have no decor in the kitchen. I have an idea of what we want to do in there, but no specific colors picked out and no solid plans. I needed to do something a little less permanent, so I went a different direction.

First I found my frame, which was originally holding this lovely floral print that just screams “cheap hotel room” which I bought for $1 at a garage sale.

After a good sanding I sprayed it with a hammered metal spray paint from Rustolium (I am also using it for my DIY window treatments, that post will be coming soon).

Since the print that was originally inside the frame was mounted to a nice thick piece of cardboard I just used that as the insert that I would mount my schedule to. With it being the holiday season, I thought it would be nice to be a little festive so I picked out this pretty wrapping paper for my background. I just wrapped the cardboard insert with my paper.

I printed out a copy of my cleaning schedule, with colors modified to match the wrapping paper, onto a nice thick piece of card stock. I also created a menu that matched and mounted both to the wrapping paper covered cardboard. Popped it in the frame and voila! I just mounted it to the wall with my trusty Command strips and now we are on schedule.

So far so good, the schedule seems to be working too. I am already caught up with laundry and getting my house in order. Yay me!