Now that I have a lot more free time on my hands and needing to be distracted from my internal monologue (that's another post for another day), I came up with my own little cleaning schedule. If you're a Pinterest addict like me, you'll have seen one or two of these. They're all different, but basically the idea is that every day you have a small list of things to clean in your house that allows you to cycle through a week or month and keep your house sparking and shiny.
These are great, but the problem I kept coming across was having the schedule not apply to my house. Besides, in a house with only two people, I found a lot of the "daily" tasks a little excessive. We don't need to vacuum every day or take out the trash every day. So I decided to make my own. I'll include my list below, but first I wanted to show you how to do your own. I found a ton of different cleaning schedules, but nothing with a tutorial.
1. Grab a sheet of paper and a pen and list every chore that you would like to get done. Go room by room, if that's easiest, and write down everything. From wiping down the bannister to collecting the mail.
2. Separate your chores into daily, weekly and monthly, according to when these tasks need to be done. Keep the daily and monthly lists shorter than the weekly one.
3. This is the tricky part. You have to decide whether you want to do a room per day or a type of task per day. For instance, you can have one day devoted to vacuuming the entire house, or you can have one devoted to cleaning JUST the dining room, or JUST the living room, etc. and vacuum the floors on those days. For instance, I HATE dragging out the heavy vacuum cleaner, so I use just two days to do the entire house (one day for upstairs, one day for downstairs).
4. Once you've decided that, start lumping the tasks together into groups of chores that you will get done on the same day. I clean all bathrooms on one day, for example, and I change the bed linens on the same day that I dust and vacuum the upstairs (since the Master Bedroom is really the only room on the first floor that I need to clean). This is all very house-specific, which is why it's better to devise your own cleaning schedule. If your master bedroom is on the first floor next to the kitchen, you might want to lump those cleaning tasks together. Whatever floats your boat.
5. By this point, you should have 4-7 "groups." Since there are only 7 days in the week, you shouldn't have more than 7. If you want to leave yourself "off" days, consolidate some of your groups together. Luckily, I only had about 4, with 1 group that consisted only of "errands" and "misc."
6. Assign a day to each task. On the surface, you shouldn't have to put much thought into this, but I did. I like to give myself an easy day on Monday and I worked my kitchen day (which includes grocery shopping and fridge clean-out) around our local trash pickup as well as our grocery store's sale rotation. You may want to get your difficult cleaning tasks out of the way early, or build up to them, or alternate days.
7. Do the schedule for a week or two, then sit down and look at it again. Do you need to move some tasks to different days? Switch your days up? I had originally forgotten to consider the trash day like I mentioned in the step above, so I switched my kitchen day to a different day. If you are left with a day that was easier than you thought, you might want to add on another chore or steal one from the "monthly" list.
8. After the first week or so, you may find that you don't need to do certain tasks every week. Maybe the carpets aren't as dirty as you thought they would be and you can take care of them every other week. Feel free to skip certain tasks and take care of them next time. Knowing that you have a standing appointment with your shower allows you to skip every once in a while, but still reminds you to get to it at some point.
As promised, here is my schedule:
Daily Tasks
Get the mail (sort it, pay bills, etc.)
Pick up after yourself (and my husband)
Laundry - one load a day, as needed
Make dinner (I have to put this on my list, or else I'll forget to take chicken out of the freezer or something. I'm a dingbat that way.)
Monday: Downstairs
Sweep/vacuum entire downstairs
Dust downstairs - living room, dining room, my office
Water plants
Wipe down bannister - it gets finger smudges
Tuesday: Bathrooms
Clean toilets
Wipe down counters/mirrors
Clean tub/shower
Change out hand towels
Take out trash
Wednesday: Master Bedroom
(disclaimer: Our upstairs consists of my husband's office--which I don't touch--our master suite, and two guest rooms. We never use our guest rooms for anything and I will talk about why at a later date. But when I originally came up with this plan, they included these guest rooms.)
Sweep/Vacuum master suite
Dust bedroom
Change/wash bedsheets
Thursday: Kitchen
(As mentioned before, I moved this day from Tuesday to Thursday. Trash pickup is Friday, so the old fridge/pantry food won't be sitting for too long and our grocery store's sales for the week start on Thursday, so I can catch them before they've been cleared out.)
Clean out fridge/pantry
Clean stovetop/microwave
Wipe down table/counters
Clean sink
Change out hand towel
Grocery shopping
Friday: Misc.
Usually, I go to Target or our local wholesale club, but this day is open to anything else that didn't get done during the week.
I chose to alternate easy days with difficult days (I hate bathrooms the most!), and found that most of these days go a lot quicker than you would think, leaving me the rest of the day to relax or go to doctor's appointments or whatever. I also have a To-Do List on the fridge that I can work from when I've finished my chores and am in the mood to do more. I was surprised to find out that I can clean the entire house in only 4 days!
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