If you are anything like me, keeping a clean house with chronic illness can be completely draining. Add children on top of that and at times you feel like you may as well give up the battle. In the past, I have always waited until the weekend to do major cleaning so I ended up spending my entire Saturday morning cleaned and by the time I was done I was completely wiped and didn’t want to do anything the rest of the day. When you work during the week, you want family time on the weekends and I just didn’t feel like I was getting as much as I wanted or even needed.
Enter my cleaning scheduled. Hubs thinks I am a complete dork for having a typed up schedule on my fridge (and maybe I am!) but it has helped me tremendously! If I plan out my cleaning a little each day, I can keep a clean house with spoons to spare. Obviously it requires disciple and there are certain things that must be done everyday but it really helps to space out the big things, like scrubbing the bathroom or sanitizing kitchen. I love that it not only helps me energy-wise but also it saves my Saturday from being spent cleaning all day!
Here is my cleaning schedule (I have a 3 bedroom, 1 bath house so your schedule may be different depending on house size):
Weekly Cleaning Schedule
Daily
Straighten Up
Make Beds
Dump Garbage
Clean up any spots or spills
Hang up clothes
Monday
Deep clean kitchen
Tuesday
Vacuum Carpets
Sweep floors
Mop floors
Wednesday
Deep clean living room (dust, fabric sweep furniture, etc)
Thursday
Bathrooms – clean mirror, sink, tub & toilet, dump trash
Friday
Deep clean playroom & Abby’s room (dust, etc)
Saturday
Change bedding on all beds
Deep clean bedroom & office (dust, etc)
I had to laugh because just two weeks ago I did the same thing – made a daily and weekly list. I do vacuum the den, foyer, bedrooms, and kitchen every day because we have three dogs. But I have a cordless beater/bar shark for the carpeted areas (it’s very light) and a corded dirt devil stick vac for foyer, bathroom and kitchen floors. Takes me about 15 min to do the whole house. I drag out the huge bissel about once a week. I dust about twice a week. It’s easier for me to do it all in 10-15 minutes twice than 20-30 minutes once.
Bathrooms are damp wiped daily — everyone’s responsible for their own daily wipe-down of sink, toilet, tub/shower. I do the floors once a week — takes about 10 minutes to do both. A real spoon-saver is those shower things that you turn on every few days that spray cleaner around the tub/shower enclosure. No more scrubbing tubs/showers, ever.
Kitchen is clean-as-I-go and I nag anyone else who uses my kitchen to leave it in the condition they found it or I will go ballistic!!
It works. You are absolutely correct — pacing the work over several days definitely saves spoons.
Hope you had a good Christmas and happy 2011!!
I’m totally stealing your list. We have two bathrooms but I’m just responsible for cleaning one. I’m home all the time but still can’t find the time to clean up, so it gets pushed to the weekend. The other thing I do…when the house is really messy…is invite people over. It forces me to clean. And if I need to deep clean, I invite my mom. 🙂
I’ve been trying to develop a cleaning system…and stick to it. That’s my biggest problem!
I’m not a spoonie, but I do find myself with too little time to do everything. I’m going to steal your list a bit.
I love cleaning all day Saturday and then kicking back and enjoying it, but too often I don’t HAVE all day Saturday to clean. This will help!