Scheduling: the solution for a clean and happy home

Scheduling: the solution for a clean and happy home

Clean houses have one thing in common: cleaning chores are tackled according to a schedule. Haphazard cleaning isn’t only ineffective—it takes longer. The quickest and simplest route to a clean house is to schedule cleaning tasks on a daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal basis.

I know, I know—you have a million reasons why you don’t want to clean on a schedule. You’re a free spirit. You’re pregnant. Your spouse works odd shifts. You’re an artistic type and sticking to a schedule would dampen your creativity.

Trust me; in over 10 years of teaching these skills, I have heard every rationale ever offered for resisting this truth. But truth it remains. There’s only one reason to schedule housework: because doing so gets the job done fastest and most easily.

Little and often:

Housework delayed is housework multiplied. Dust the breakfast nook weekly, and it’s a quick-swipe, two-minute job. Wait a month, and enough air-borne grease has settled over the dust to require (a) oil soap, (b) elbow grease, and (c) an energetic half-hour to return the furniture to a state of clean.

Better to schedule two easy minutes a week than to play catch-up with a sweaty half-hour once a month.

Whatever your mental roadblock to the idea, consider establishing a cleaning schedule. By scheduling chores so that they’re performed regularly—before the problems mushroom exponentially—the house stays cleaner, and the house cleaners do less work to keep it that way. Use these sample checklists as a start-point to develop one that’s right for your household:

Daily cleaning checklist

▪ Make beds

▪ Place dirty clothing in hampers

▪ Wash, dry, and put away one load of laundry

▪ Clear kitchen counters and wipe down stovetop

▪ Clean kitchen sink

▪ Take out kitchen garbage

▪ Sweep kitchen floor

▪ Pick up family room and play areas (put away toys, stack newspapers, remove clutter)

Weekly cleaning checklist

▪ Change bed linens and bathroom towels

▪ Clean bathrooms

▪ Clean kitchen counters and wipe inside of microwave oven

▪ Wash or dust hard-surface floors

▪ Dust furniture

▪ Vacuum carpets and rugs

▪ Check entryway or porch; sweep if needed

The case against spring-cleaning:

In Grandma’s day, spring-cleaning was mandatory. It marked the end of the heating season, when the entire house was scrubbed clean of the smoky film given off by older heat sources. With today’s heating technology, this rationale no longer applies. Modern lives, too, cannot sustain an oldfashioned cleaning marathon.

So how do we replace spring-cleaning? With a workable household cleaning schedule. Homes cleaned according to schedule stay reasonably clean all the time. A cleaning schedule integrates seasonal cleaning chores into daily or weekly cleaning sessions, and no task goes too long without being done. Result: a clean home all year around.