I go to other peoples houses and wonder, "How do they do it?" Even when I am keeping up with the house work by the end of the day I look around and it looks like I didn't do any cleaning at all! Ugh, it never ends!
When Stella was first born we were living in Elk River, it's a long story and I won't go into it right now but we were living at my parents house. (They had moved out.) I really struggled those first couple months to get anything done. Stella wanted to cuddle all the time and I was enjoying every minute of it. I was still in the early stages of motherhood and finding enough time to even take a shower was a struggle. But because we were living at my parents house everyone and their brother knew where we lived... so it wasn't uncommon for the doorbell to ring unexpectedly in the middle of the day because someone wanted to see the baby. I appreciated all of the love we received and welcomed everyone in the house with open arms but my house was a disaster! We have three dogs... one being a very big dog that sheds more than any dog I have ever seen, so there was constantly dog hair all over the floor. Ick! I feel sorry for those poor people who came to visit and had to sit in my dirty house.
So when we bought the house in Hastings I decided I needed to step it up and become a better housekeeper. Some days are better than others but most of the time the house is "pop-in ready". Which means if someone were to just "pop-in" unexpectedly the house would be in decent shape and I wouldn't feel sorry for the visitors who had to be in the house. Of course, now we live 60 miles away from Elk River so unexpected pop-ins never happen anymore.
To keep the house "pop-in ready", I created a cleaning schedule. I keep it in a sheet protector on my fridge and use a wet erase marker to check off the tasks. Then I just wipe it off and reuse it the next week.
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| Ignore the fact that nothing is actually checked off of this list. :) |
Do I do every item listed for the day everyday? No. I try to, but again, some days are better than others. When I do keep up with the list it makes cleaning a lot easier and quicker. Because I'm basically just doing touch ups everyday. Each day I have a different area I focus on, like on Wednesdays I clean the bathroom, (luckily we only have one right now, as the other is being renovated, that long journey will be a future post) this makes cleaning more attainable. If I had to deep clean the entire house in one day it would be overwhelming. This way it is broken up into smaller tasks and I'm more likely to keep up with it. I always feel gross when the house is a mess and now with Stella crawling and getting into everything I feel better knowing the floors have been vacuumed and mopped on a regular basis.
Here is a close up of my schedule.
Lately, I've been slacking a bit. (Hence the blank schedule shown hung on my refrigerator.) A lot of my time has been focused on The Harper Project and my new adventure selling candles on my Etsy shop. I'm hoping by posting this it will give me the motivation to get my butt in gear and get back on track.
Do you have a cleaning schedule that you use to help keep your house clean? What has worked for you and what hasn't? I love getting new ideas!
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