An Easy Way to Keep Your House Clean

I am a slob. I know it. My husband knows it (and hates it!). Everybody in my family knows it. It is a battle that I fight with every single day. When I was younger, I just forced others to deal with this bad habit of mine. Now that I am a mom and a wife and have other people depending on me, I have found a way to improve my slob status to just “occassionally disorganized”. If you are like me, you probably hate living in the clutter just as much as everyone else does, but you also don’t know how to change it. Well, after years of trying to find a solution to this problem, I finally found a cleaning schedule that works great for me.

The first thing you will need is a calendar with a lot of space for writing. Next, you want to think about the cleaning jobs in your house and group them into jobs that need to be completed everyday and jobs that need to be done on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. When I thought about the jobs in my house, I concluded that the kitchen needed to be cleaned everyday and some sort of laundry should be completed every day. This plan really only works if you only have one or two “everyday jobs” otherwise you would spend too much time cleaning everyday. The other jobs in my household that could be completed once a week or less were: livingroom, guest bathroom, master bathroom, bedroom, daughter’s nursery, garage, closets, etc.

After you have compiled a list of jobs that need to be done in your house and determined which jobs need to be done everyday or weekly, you are ready to set up your calendar. For each day on your calendar, you should put your everyday jobs (one or two jobs) and one of the weekly jobs. So for my calendar,every day I have the kitchen, the laundry, and one weekly job. My husband is very helpful around the house, so he and I take turns on the everyday jobs. One day I will clean the kitchen and he will do laundry and the next day we switch. I usually do the weekly jobs, but I don’t mind because I am usually the one making the messes. If the weekly job is something like the garage, he will do it that one. You could find a way for you and a partner to work together on the weekly job or switch off somehow.

The reason that this is a great plan is because for slobs like myself, we do not have the stamina (nor the desire!) to spend hours cleaning our houses. Once you have made it through a few weeks, and have hit each weekly job once or twice, by the time that job ends up on the calendar again it will still be clean! At that point, it takes hardly any time at all to get the job finished. I spend about one hour or less cleaning each day, which is so much better than spending hours or days cleaning up whenever we are going to have company over. It is also a relief to not worry when we have guests stop by without notice. If you have a difficult time keeping your house clean like I always have, try my plan. I’m sure that it will work as great for you as it has for me!