House Cleaning Schedule

 Keeping your home clean can sometimes feel like an impossible task, but one great way to make it feel less daunting is to set a schedule. Creating a house cleaning schedule will help ensure that you keep every part of your home clean, even the parts that you’d typically pay less attention to. When you’re ready to make a cleaning schedule for your home, follow these tips to make sure you get the job done right.

YOUR DAILY FOCUS: KEEP DIRT AWAY

A daily cleaning schedule attacks the messes and dirt that accumulate in your house every day. It will keep your home tidy but doesn’t do much about serious grime. By following this schedule, you’ll have a house you can relax in after a long day at work. In fact, living in a clean home may even make you a happier person.

Try accomplishing these tasks to prevent messes from getting out of control:

  • Make your bed
  • Put dirty clothes in hamper
  • Do a load of laundry when you have enough dirty clothes
  • Wipe countertops after preparing meals
  • Wash dishes (or load dishwasher)
  • Spend 10 minutes picking up and putting away clutter
  • Wipe out the kitchen and bathroom sinks

 

Tips for Cleaning Every Week

Tackle one room or job each day so you’re not doing everything all at once. For example, devote Monday to cleaning kitchen messes, bring out the vacuum on Tuesday, make Wednesday the day for changing sheets, and so on.

Clean inside of microwave: Heat a microwave-safe bowl filled with 1 cup of water and several tablespoons of vinegar on high power for several minutes until the window is steamy. Let cool for 5 minutes before opening the door, then remove the bowl, and wipe the inside clean with a sponge.

Scrub bathroom surfaces: We like CLR Bath & Kitchen Cleaner for grout and Mr. Clean Magic Eraser Bath for glass, tile, and tub surfaces.

Sanitize sponges: Mix 3/4 cup of bleach in 1 gallon of water and soak the sponge for five minutes, then rinse – that’s it.

 

Four Easy Chores to Do Every Day

If you have a small family who mostly eats out, dishes on a daily basis may not be a priority. Modify your daily chores to reflect the needs of your family. Use the following as a guide.

Clean the Dishes

Maybe you’ve never seen what happens to a sink full of dishes left to sit, but it isn’t pretty. Smells, stains, and odd fungal growth usually go with forgotten dirty dishes. Cleaning dishes daily is the best choice all around. If you can’t manage to actually wash the dishes, at least make a rule that dishes will be scraped, rinsed, and stacked on a daily basis. This will prevent mold and insects from invading your home. If you have a dishwasher, use it regularly.

Do the Laundry

Not every family needs to wash laundry daily, but many of us find that at least a daily load of laundry is necessary. With work clothes, school uniforms, soccer practice clothes, and sports uniforms, families can generate a lot of dirty clothes. A daily load can help prevent a mad dash to find a baseball jersey in the bottom of a hamper or an overwhelming pile at the end of the week. If you have a really large family you may need to up your number of loads a day. Luckily, laundry is something that even school-aged kids can do with minimal supervision once they are trained.

Tidy Up

Doing a little clutter control on a daily basis keeps your home ready for company at a moment’s notice. A few minutes of picking up each day also prevent your home from turning into a disaster zone that will take hours to plow through. A tidy room makes a big difference in our motivation to tackle bigger projects. Use the 15 Minute Cleanups as a daily help to keep your main rooms ready for visitors. Try instituting a quick-pick-up session before bed. Make it more fun by trying to beat your best times or racing against other family members.

File Papers

If you don’t file daily, you risk piles of papers on every surface in your home. Between junk mail, letter offers, school papers, and receipts, paper can overtake our homes very quickly. It only takes a few minutes each day to prevent a major pileup. If possible set up a mail center with a shredder, trash can, and mailing supplies. Check the mail once a day and deal with each item as you open it. Shred it, trash it, respond, or file depending on where the paper needs to go.

 

Schedule High Priority Tasks First

 Fill high priority tasks into your open time slots first.

Remember that these tasks were the most important ones to you and your family.  As a result, you might want to schedule them every day or every other day, if it makes sense to do so.

Depending on your priorities, you might have tasks like make the bed, declutter, and wipe down kitchen counters listed every day.

Add Medium Priority Tasks Next

For most of us, medium-priority tasks make up the bulk of our cleaning routines.  Vacuuming, dusting, and thorough bathroom cleaning might have landed on your medium priority list.

At this point in the home cleaning planning process, you’ll need to decide how and when to complete these medium-priority tasks.

You should decide whether to plan for:

  • A different medium task each day of the week (Such as dusting on Thursdays, mopping/vacuuming on Fridays), or
  • Completing all of your medium cleaning tasks on 1 weekly bulk cleaning day (Such as dusting, vacuuming, and cleaning bathrooms on Saturday mornings).

Your approach will depend on the time slots available on your schedule, as well as your style of cleaning.

  • Do you like compressed, marathon-style power cleaning sessions, where you can knock out a bunch of stuff at once?
  • Or do you feel less overwhelmed with an expanded schedule, tackling 1 medium-priority task per day?
  • You could even do a hybrid where you bulk half of your tasks on 1 day, and the other half on another day.

 

Key Steps:

  • Break up cleaning tasks into daily, weekly, and monthly events
  • Daily tasks include quick tidy ups and dealing with dirty laundry and surfaces
  • Weekly tasks mean thorough cleans of appliances, floors, and rooms like the bathroom
  • Monthly tasks include time-intensive jobs like cleaning the windows, furniture, and decluttering
  • Don’t work alone! Ask your family or housemates for help.

A personalised house cleaning schedule is essential if you want a clean and tidy home. A good schedule will ensure no areas are missed and that every area is well maintained, and it will make it easy for you to manage your time!