Organize Your House Cleaning Schedule In 3 Easy Steps

When you were a working woman, you may have had a cleaning routine that worked for you in your limited hours at home.  Maybe you had someone come in and clean.  Maybe you had people living at your house like a partner and children who took up some of the slack.  Whatever your arrangement was, it worked for you during that stage of your life.  I was lucky to have a wonderful woman clean my house when my children were young.  Our family had a routine for putting things away and getting things straightened up so she could come in and do her magic with a mop and toilet brush.  It was truly money well spent.  It cut down on the conflicts I had with the kids and gave us all more free time to do fun things on the weekends.

If you didn’t have someone to do the dirty work, you probably spent some of your short weekend getting laundry done and scrubbing the tub along with other things keep a home livable.  Guess what, when you retire, you can develop a plan that works into your schedule and isn’t as much of a chore.  A few easy steps will help you organize your tasks.

How big is your house?

You will want to figure how large your home is and how many rooms there are in your home and analyze what you do in each room.  Some rooms are high traffic and get lots of use and some have doors that are rarely opened.  When I watch HouseHunters, one of my go to random entertainment choices, I always cringe when the people want more than 2 bathrooms.  I wonder if they’ve ever had to clean 3 bathrooms every week.  I digress, knowing how many and what kinds of rooms you have helps you plan your approach to cleaning.

How long does it take to clean each room?

The next time you clean a room, see how much time it takes.  Write it somewhere so you won’t forget.  Times will vary from room to room, depending upon how deeply you want to clean each room and what belongs in the space.  For example, if you have a collection of 1000 figurines in one room, it will take lots of time to dust them.  Don’t estimate the time it will take to clean each room because that will make your planning a little more difficult.

Make a plan

Once you know how many rooms you have and how much time it takes to clean each room you can start experimenting with cleaning schedules. There are lots of suggestions on the web and you might find one that fits your situation.   One suggestion I read was to spend one hour per day in every room.  This is good schedule for people who want to dive deep and clean the living bejesus out of a room, and it is a great idea for some, but you may have so many rooms in your home, you wouldn’t get to a room again for awhile or the room simply doesn’t take an your to clean, unless you have 1000 figurines.  You may also want to focus more on light cleaning at more regular intervals and save the deep cleaning for a time when you can really roll your sleeves up.  Knowing how much you want to clean each room, and how often is important.

My home is 2600 square feet and for most of the year, only my husband and I live here.  I break the cleaning into small chunks because I know it will get done. If I have a daunting task I can easily put off for another day it will be put off. I light clean every room in my home once a week and each bout of cleaning takes less than 1 hour.  I clean several rooms at a time each day and I only clean 4 days a week and have 3 days off.   I don’t really need to clean most rooms every week, but I do anyway to be in a routine and in case I miss a week for some reason, the house will still be pretty clean so I don’t have to play catch-up. I record the date I cleaned each room as well because the weeks do go by and sometimes you can forget what day it is. I’ve included my cleaning schedule as an example, sorry about the clarity of the visual. I set this up on a spread sheet and keep it on the top of my desktop. I feel a sense of satisfaction when I can check the little box. This works for me, what will work for you?