A Guide to setting up a cleaning schedule you can actually stick to
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Have you heard the phrase “Ever cleaned your house everyday only to have to clean your house everyday”? It can be so overwhelming and feel like a useless battle.
However, physical clutter can cause mental clutter, and it can really help your family to have systems in place and start each day with a tidy home.
In this blog, I will share 5 tips on how I keep up with my home and give tips on how you can do the same.
· Why I even started this and why you should too
· Break up the cleaning
· Start a load of laundry right away in the morning
· Start small and give yourself grace
· Have easy cleaners and tools
I am absolutely a person who feels “behind” and unable to move on for my day if the house is a mess and needing picked up. It makes my day move a lot more slowly for myself and my husband if we use our systems and keep things where they belong.
I’m sure you are reading this and thinking “of course you can keep up with your home, you stay at home and don’t work.” Well, when I first started this, I was working full time in person and commuting about 30 minutes each way to work. So I was not someone who was swimming in time. We also traveled most weekends because we lived far from family and friends.
These tips and routine I am sharing should take you less than an hour each day, hopefully! I know an hour seems so crazy, but it will be broken up into different times.
Why I even started this and why you should too
I was feeling trapped at home on the weekends or I was up all night during the week sometimes trying to get laundry done. I worked full time and thought I had to do all of our laundry on the weekends so I would stay home and do laundry most of the weekend and not get out much.
I also only cleaned on the weekends for the most part. So basically outside of work, I cleaned and did laundry….not a trajectory I wanted to stay on! Can you blame me??
I had some friends come to town one weekend in 2021 and I was doing laundry all weekend in between everything we did. They thought I was crazy. They said they do one load of laundry each day during the week and took the weekends off. What?!
Maybe this is something everyone does, and it was just me doing 15 loads of laundry on weekends. But I also implemented this with cleaning, and it has been a game changer.
You CAN have a tidy home and a flourishing life all at the same time.
Break up the cleaning
You can do this in a few different ways! When I first started, I was breaking up the cleaning by task because that is what I saw someone doing on Instagram. That worked really well in our old home that was a little smaller, but when we moved to a little bit bigger home, it wasn’t working for me.
Breaking it up by task would be doing dusting on Mondays for example, and you dust your entire house that day. You would do floors for the entire house one day, and so on. Again, this worked great when it was just my husband and I in a smaller home. But when we added kiddos and a few more bedrooms and square footage this was not realistic anymore.
Now, I break it up by rooms and I do that entire room that day. On Mondays, I clean our bathrooms, Tuesdays the kitchen gets a good clean, Wednesdays I do bedrooms, Thursday is for the living & family rooms and Friday is for the miscellaneous areas like hallways and such – this gets skipped most.
The other thing I do is sometimes I do a deeper clean than other times. I do not clean the baseboards of any room every week – I am sure that is gross for some and others are like well duh, who does? I wipe out our fridge about once a month, clean the cupboards about once a month and sort through our pantry once every few months. Each week I just pick one “extra” thing for that room and do that.
Some weeks, I am short on time and I just make sure the important things (toilets, showers, counters, etc) are washed and I can get our three bathrooms done in less than 20 minutes.
Start a load of laundry right away in the morning
This is huge! But what helps even more, is sorting the laundry the night before. When you sort the night before, there is no thinking even required. Just grab a basket or have one already in the laundry room ready to go.
I have seen that some people even run a load overnight and then in the morning one load is ready to dry! I think this would be especially helpful if you are a working mama. I have a hard time putting laundry away or folding it while my son is awake because of the stage he is at. I usually wait until he is napping and put a few loads away. If you are needing to run off to work, you can run a load in the wash at night and dry it right away in the morning. I try to do small loads more frequently so they don’t take a long time to put away. You could let it dry while you get ready and then put it away and get the next one started before leave!
I also look at starting a load of laundry similar to making your bed. You have an immediate win to start your day and you are set up for success!
I split up my laundry the same way I split up cleaning. Below is what I do each day for laundry.
Monday: Clothes (I do adults and kiddo)**
Tuesday: Towels (kitchen, bath, cleaning)
Wednesday: Sheets
Thursday: Clothes (I do adults and kiddo again)
Friday: Catch up day
**Sometimes getting all clothes washed in the same day is too much if we are gone a lot that day, if I do kid laundry on Tuesday, I move the towels to Wednesday with the sheets and then do the second kid load on Friday!
Start small and give yourself grace
If starting this seems extremely overwhelming or you are already very behind, start with something small! Create a system that feels doable long term and ease into it. If you are behind, know that it will take a month or so (maybe more) to feel like you are caught up.
My favorite part about following this list, is that you get to ignore everything else when it is not the day to work on that. Sometimes I just look at my microwave and its just truly tragic. Small messes have started to add up and its just looking awful. But I smile at it and remind myself that on Tuesday, I’ll get that all worked out.
If you aren’t used to cleaning each day or you are worried about time, start with just 10 or 20 minutes on the assigned room. Go from there! It will be much easier to get into the routine that way. Eventually you will get faster too which will help!
Have easy cleaners and tools
This one might seem weird and it took me the longest to get on board with. When I say easy cleaners, I mean one cleaner. I use Branch Basics and it has simplified my life in a huge way.
You get one concentrate, and you can use it for all purpose cleaner, bathroom cleaner, laundry detergent and glass cleaner. The part I did not realize right away was that each bottle has a different dilution of concentrate, so you are not using the same thing to clean your toilets and your clothes.
The reason this makes your life easier is you do not have to run out and make sure you get a lot of different cleaners; you just have to make sure you get a concentrate delivered and you are all set! I also use this for stains as well and it has gotten bloody nose mess out of sheets and pillows, baby poo stains out of…well every baby item we have and many more!
For tools, I use Scrub daddy sponges. I buy a big pack of them and use them all over the house. I just make sure to keep the bathroom one separate from everything else. I like them because they are soft when wet but they also pack a mean punch and can scrub things really well without a lot of effort on my part.
I know it can seem so overwhelming to be all caught up on laundry and cleaning and keeping your house tidy, but it is possible!! Make a schedule that you think will work for you and give it a go. If you find that it isn’t working, tweak it and change things up. I promise it will be worth it for your sanity!
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