Creating a House Cleaning Schedule

The key to keeping house cleaning from overrunning your family life is to create a plan consistent with your housecleaning philosophy and stick to it.  As with any new plan or change there will be bumps along the way, so don’t be afraid to fine tune it as you go along or change it as your schedule changes. 

How to Start

Begin by making a master list of all your house cleaning chores.  After you have made your master list, go through the list and indicate whether they should be done on a weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, or annually time basis.

After you have your master list complete, go through and clean it up by writing it on a house cleaning schedule.  You can use one of ours, create your own to suit your own tastes and style, or try using an online chore organizer like MyChores to help get you organized.

                House Cleaning Schedule – PDF Format

                House Cleaning Schedule – Word Format

After you have a clean copy of your house cleaning schedule, print off a copy to keep in your Kitchen Folio or attached to your refrigerator and bulletin board.

Also, be sure to add the chores to your family calendar or planner as well as to your daily routines.

Tips to Make House Cleaning Easier

Get the entire family involved in the house cleaning by assigning age appropriate chores to kids and consider paying them a weekly allowance. 

Avoid adding a lot of cleaning to the days when you have a lot of appointments or errands.

Keep it flexible – be willing to move things around a bit to fit in last minute requests from the kids or work or the school

Don’t save everything for one day of the week.  Do a little bit every day so that you don’t become overwhelmed.  It is much easier to find a free 30 minutes here or there rather than a 2 or 3 hour block of time to clean the house.

House Cleaning – The Thorn in Every Family’s Side

Our house cleaning philosophy here at Families with Purpose is simple – clean it to your standards, minimize the distraction it takes on your family life, and don’t beat yourself up when it doesn’t get done.   And with this philosophy in mind you won’t find us spending a lot of time writing about how to clean your house.  We would much rather write about creating an authentic family life for yourself and children than how to clean your house.   We will leave the nitty gritty of cleaning up to the experts like FlyLady, Real Simple, and Organized Home.  They can teach you much more about cleaning than we ever could and really are the experts.

So if you haven’t deserted us for one of the cleaning experts, here are the details behind our house cleaning philosophy.  Tomorrow we will talk more specifically about how you can create your own house cleaning plan.

Clean It to Your Standards – Just like everyone has a different tolerance for pain, everyone has a different tolerance for a dirty house.  Some of us won’t be satisfied if we aren’t Martha Stewart clean while others go through life just fine being pleasantly blind to the 1 inch covering of dust on the furniture.  The point is to be honest with yourself about what is important to you (not your mother! ) and what in reality you can accomplish.   After you have determined what a realistic standard is for yourself and family, accept it and find peace with that standard. 

Minimize the Distraction it Takes on Your Family – We have talked in the past about the peace in having a plan, and establishing a house cleaning plan is no different.  Just knowing that you have a plan to get the cleaning done brings a lot of comfort to any busy parent.  The key to any house cleaning plan though is in finding that delicate balance between having a clean house and getting it done without sacrificing too much family harmony.  Your plan has to be robust enough so that the kids aren’t embarrassed to bring over their friends, but not so over the top that you have no time for fun.    You want your house cleaning plan such that you find yourself saying yes more often than no to last minute requests for a game of Family Fun or fun bike rides around the neighborhood.

Don’t Beat Yourself Up When It Doesn’t Get Done – The reality of life is that everything on our do list is not going to get done.  There will be days when house cleaning will take a backseat to late work nights, science fair projects, and Little League baseball games and THAT IS OKAY.  After all, how do you want your kids to remember you?  As a parent who was always cleaning or a parent who made it to every game?  You decide and remember the little things really do matter.