Cleaning Schedule

When we first got married, we were not really that great at doing housework. We both worked part time and were in school full time. And we lived in a tiny, one bedroom apartment. With such small space we didn’t actually need to do a lot of housework. If something got messy we ignored it, which wasn’t too hard since we weren’t home a lot anyway.

When we moved to a larger apartment a year after we were married {we moved to a three bedroom – huge improvement}, we had more space to make more mess. It got easier to ignore messes because there was always some space that wasn’t messy. It was easier to just move piles because there were more places for piles to be.

We often ignored the housework during the week. Since Dan worked full time and I was at school every single day from 7am until 5pm or later, by the time we each came home, we didn’t really care what the place looked like. We just needed to have some downtime, and in my case, do a whole bunch of homework. We finally realized something needed to change when we were spending huge chunks of our Saturdays doing housework so the apartment would be clean for Sunday. Yeah, probably not the best way to do things.

So we came up with a cleaning schedule. And it saved our apartment. It saved our Saturdays. It saved my sanity. I love having a clean house and I love feeling organized, but I sure don’t love spending hours and hours cleaning. So the cleaning schedule eliminated those hours spent all at once.

And you know what? Even though I’m a full-time mom now instead of a full-time student, I still use a cleaning schedule. I have a lot of things I love to do. I love to read, to bake, do rubber stamping, sing, take pictures & edit them, blog, play with my little girl and spend quality time with my guy – if I want to really spend time with any of those things, I have to keep up with my house. Otherwise I’ll go crazy.

I know some people are fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants kind of people - and they get everything done. I cannot to do this! It’s not for lack of trying, either. ;) If I don’t have plans, schedules, lists, nothing ever gets done and I remain a disorganized crazy woman. I could run around like a chicken with my head cut off if it weren’t for a few pieces of paper in my life.

Here’s how I created my cleaning schedule:

• I went through every room in the house and listed all the things I wanted to be cleaned each week in each room.
• I also listed how often that item needed to be done.
• I then separated everything into rooms or general categories.
• I divided everything up into days of the week.

The schedule I use today looks different than the one I used several years ago when I was in college. Living in a larger house and having a toddler changes the needs of my household. But this is what my cleaning schedule looks like right now:

I have specific jobs Monday-Thursday. On Fridays I clean house for an elderly couple in town so I don't do much work in my own house on those days. I have a general list of things I do every day and then more specific chores are divided into the four days of the week I designate for my own house cleaning.

This is the schedule for each individual day.

These are the things that are supposed to get done each day & what I do Friday.

I know this seems pretty ideal. Really simple. It's easy to get off track. It's easy to look at a day and think, "Those rooms don't really need much attention. I'm tired. I'll just do it tomorrow." It's a slippery slope, for sure. It takes a certain amount of discipline for me to just do what needs to be done on the days it is supposed to be done. But every time I do, I'm so happy. I get to the end of the day and feel like I've accomplished so much. If I just do my daily chores first thing in the morning {after my walks}, and the general things throughout the day as needed, then I have the rest of the day to do other things. It works so so well for me.

One of the keys with the cleaning schedule is reviewing and revising, because needs do change. This may gross some people out, but before we had Livie, my floors were lucky if they got vacuumed once a week. When you only have two adults who don't wear shoes in the house, it just didn't seem to need it. But it needs done more often now. So revising the schedule every now and then helps me really meet the needs of my family.

I love having a cleaning schedule.

Schedules created using Picnik.