Scheduled Cleaning

Posted by Whitney on Sep 12, 2011 in DIY, For the Home | 15 comments

It is no secret that I am not the best at staying on top of the cleaning in my home.  Hubby and I both work from home, we have 3 children…..it gets messy.  What usually happens is things just start piling up, then at some point either Nick or I has a minor melt-dow and we take an entire day and just clean the whole house.  That means a day of not working, not hanging out with the kids and being completely exhausted by day’s end.  Well, in an effort to try and change this awful cycle we have been in, I have concocted a plan.  It’s nothing ground breaking, just a simple schedule to ensure that my whole home stays in decent shape so we don’t have to freak out when we find out we have company coming last minute and the house is trashed.

Here is the schedule that I came up with for myself:

Basically what I did was list all of the minor cleaning tasks that need to be completed regularly to keep the house in good shape.  You can see on the top of the chart I have broken those tasks up into daily chores.  This will be displayed in my home in a picture frame and the ENTIRE FAMILY will be pitching in.  We have already agreed.  Then there on the bottom is a list of all the rooms in my home.  Now, you can see there in the top box there is a ‘DC’ on most days, that ‘DC’ stands for deep clean.  Each week we will pick one room to deep clean and do a little bit each day to clean the room from top to bottom.  This way we can break up the major cleaning a bit, but still be sure that it is accomplished.  Since we have 14 rooms, it will take 14 weeks to get the entire home deep cleaned, which is totally fine with me.

I understand that this won’t work for everyone, but for me this is a schedule that doesn’t completely overwhelm me.  I can see myself and my family actually sticking to this and not have cleaning rule our lives in the process.  I have always had a love hate relationship with cleaning (meaning I love things that are clean, I just hate taking the time to clean), but breaking it up into bite-size pieces it completely doable!  I just try to remember what my good friend Kara said, “I’d rather my kids remember me as a fun, messy mommy than a grouchy, clean mommy.”

If you’d like to give my cleaning schedule a shot I created this printable templete, just download it and fill it in with your own chores and rooms.  Be ure to come back and let me know how it worked out for you and give suggestions on modifications.

Download the template here:  Cleaning Schedule Download (173)