Life has been a smidge crazy since we moved to Kentucky. Back in Chicago, we had many weekends free, or at least one entire day at home.
But since the move, we’ve been all over the place, all the time. Between Brian being in school and working part time and me working five to six days a week at the restaurant, we were never really home for more than a few hours at a time. Which unfortunately meant that the house sometimes got out of control.
You see, it’s nearly impossible to keep a house clean when you only have an hour or two. Not to mention, you really don’t want to spend that hour or two of free time cleaning! Wanting to keep a clean house but not sacrifice precious free time, I devised a cleaning system.
I know that there are a lot of cleaning systems out there, many of which are fantastic. But I ignored all of them. Instead of trying to adapt someone else’s system to my house and my life, I sat down and created my own. Here’s what I ended up with:
Instead of trying to get the entire house clean in one day, I broke down the tasks and assigned them to different days. Mondays became the living room, Tuesdays the kitchen, Wednesdays the bathroom, etc. Some days, like Friday and Saturday, are dedicated to one task throughout the whole house, like dusting or cleaning the floors. This way, instead of spending two or three hours cleaning the entire house all in one day, I was able to spend 15-20 minutes each day on a different task.
I used my sticker machine with the laminated magnet cartridge to make the cleaning zone list easily accessible to both Brian and myself (yes, I’m blessed with a hubby who helps clean the house)! All we have to do now is check the fridge to see what “zone” needs to be done, and off we go!
Do you have a cleaning system for your home? I do have to admit that we’ll probably be going back to a more traditional cleaning-the-whole-house-on-the-weekend system now that I have weekends off, but this impromptu system has been absolutely fantastic during our crazy busy weeks!
Thank you for sharing your list. I have to write one for myself, too. But atm I am busy with my emergency cleaning list to get the house company ready within the next 2 weeks…
Oh yes, the joys of emergency cleaning! Thankfully, I had the time to scrub down my whole house yesterday, which means I'll just have to do a quick run through this Friday before my in-laws come to visit!
I've had lots of different cleaning routines over the years. You have to keep changing them as your life changes. Yours looks like it should work well. And having it on the fridge like that makes it easy to remember. And if you miss a day, you can easily catch up or just skip it. Good job!
I so need to do this at the moment – I go through phases (short ones admittedly) of getting on top of it all, and then somehow it just seems to gallop away into it´s own special mess – personally I like to blame the kids, even though it´s mainly me who makes a mess 🙂
Thanks!
Let me know how it goes! This definitely helped us stay on top of things without feeling like we lost an entire day to cleaning!