Cleaning Plan

As I talked about here, I made an entire plan for cleaning this year. Here is how I did it...

For starters, I wrote down every major area in my house that needed to be cleaned. Turns out, I have 6 major areas, a perfect number to spread over a year. They are: bedrooms, bonus room (playroom in our case), bathrooms, major living areas (family room & study), kitchen and formal rooms. Before I started the planning, I printed out a years calendar and made sure to put important weekend events on it, times when I knew we would be out of town, etc. I also tried to keep in mind which Saturdays were my longer runs and schedule the less physically demanding chores on those days. Then I let the planning begin.

Next, I gave each month a focus area, for December it is the playroom. For each weekend in that month, I wrote down a task that was above and beyond my regular cleaning. For example, this past weekend, my task was to go through the toys and throw away or donate toys that the kids didn't play with or were broken, etc.

The great thing is, after I did this for the first half of the year, I could just copy it for the second half. This was the first weekend that I started my new schedule and I really like it. If you would like a copy of my totally OCD schedule, let me know, I have scanned it to a PDF and can email it to you!

I really did my best to keep up with my daily cleaning schedule that I created for during the week and although I was staying up until 11 or so most nights last week, I really reaped the benefits of it this weekend. Not only did it seem like less since I did a little each night, but I was able to do my "deep cleaning" chore with no worry about what else I needed to get done. I was also able to spend lots of time with my kids and last week, I was so tired when I crawled into bed that I slept like a rock!

For those who would like my daily tasks, here they are:

Monday - windex, kitchen

Tuesday - laundry, sheets, floors

Wednesday - iron, dust

Thursday - bathrooms

Friday - laundry, playroom

Saturday - iron, floors