Chefette&Little “When Did I Last Clean the Bathroom?” “I feel like I’m Cleaning my House the Whole Weekend.” If You Have Said or Thought any of These Phrases, This Post is For You!
What is a Cleaning Routine?
A cleaning routine is simply put an outline of when and how to clean the different areas in your home. Our homes are where we live a majority of our lives and living in a space necessitates regular cleaning of said space. A cleaning routine should serve as flexible guidelines to streamline your necessary cleaning tasks, with the goal of shortening the overall time you expend cleaning, the mental load of cleaning, hopefully giving you back some of your precious free time to spend on the many other things that you probably would rather be doing!!
Why Would You Want to Start a Cleaning Routine?
I personally think just about anyone could benefit from a cleaning routine, particularly for keeping track of the less regular cleaning tasks (cleaning the oven, deep cleaning the curtains, etc), I have followed a checklist cleaning routine for these irregular cleaning tasks for years to avoid the “when did I last clean this” moments. However establishing and implementing a weekly cleaning routine became essential for me after becoming a mom, and life got all the more busy, I have found that having this routine in place shortens my overall cleaning time as I’m cleaning high traffic areas more frequently and really eases the mental load around cleaning, and helps me and my husband to divide up the cleaning tasks more equitably. It also avoids areas from getting overwhelming dirty and gross-which personally stresses me out, haha.
While I think anyone could benefit from a weekly cleaning routine, those who are in busier life seasons may find even more benefit whether that’s parenting young children, starting school, “busy season” of work or working multiple jobs. Easing the mental load of cleaning can be helpful for pretty much everyone, even if you outsource your cleaning by hiring a regular cleaning company you would likely still establish some sort of routine for them to set expectations of what should be done and when.
Weekly Cleaning Routine Basics
A weekly cleaning routine should consist of what needs to be cleaned daily, as well as what targeted room should be cleaned each day of the week. This is where personalization comes in, I have experimented with other routines in the past and have taken bits and pieces of what worked in these routines to come up with the perfect routine for me and my family. For instance I love a lot of the FlyLady’s elements but personally just don’t feel I need to clean my toilets daily, but a load of laundry everyday to help make the task shorter each time I do it and prevent everyone from running out of clean underwear, heck yes sign me up!
While I don’t find a need to clean my toilets daily, for me and my family the bathrooms do need to be cleaned weekly, but each family is different so cleaning the bathrooms weekly might be too often for you, but I will say cleaning the bathrooms weekly definitely shortens the time it takes to clean the room since it hasn’t been super long since it was last done.
What I would recommend is to experiment and try out a few different weekly cleaning routines (you can find a printable version of the one I’ve developed here) and see what works best for you, if you find that a certain room doesn’t need to be cleaned weekly in your home adapt it to work best for you! I touched on this earlier but if you outsource some of your regular cleaning (i.e. using a cleaning company) having a weekly cleaning routine will still be useful as it will serve as a good template to review with your professional to set expectations of what you are expecting them to clean, how the cleaning should be done and the frequency in which you want the cleaning of said room completed.
Chefette and Little Weekly Cleaning Routine
This is the weekly cleaning routine that I follow, I find that maintaing this routine really decreases the overall amount of cleaning I’m doing at any given time, plus it helps me and my husband divide the cleaning roles, I also avoid the ALL day cleaning session on Saturday which that alone makes this routine worth it to me!
Giving Yourself Grace
One thing I wanted to add is that a routine is there to support you and should have flexibility, it is not meant to make you feel inadequate or as if you’re not doing enough, etc and shouldn’t be rigid. The flex day is really helpful in case life is lifeing too hard one day during the week and that day’s routine doesn’t get done. Remember to be gentle with yourself if you try one routine and it feels impossible to maintain, that’s okay it simply isn’t the best fit for you, move on and try another one or adpt the routine to better fit you! It will likely take some trial and error to find the best routine, and once you find which routine works the best for you you’ll know it. Six months from now you’ll be thanking yourself for sticking with it as cleaning your house will be easy peasy with your routine and won’t feel like the burdensome task it might feel like currently.
Key Takeaways/Final Thoughts
- Establishing a weekly cleaning routine can be helpful for pretty much everyone as it will lower the overall time spent cleaning and decrease the mental load around cleaning!
- Don’t be discouraged if you try a few routines and they aren’t a good fit for whatever reason, keep trying different routines until you find the best one for you, or feel free to adapt what you do like from each routine and make your own!!
- Out-sourcing cleaning if you can is awesome and having a regular routine to review with your cleaning professional can be really help to set expectations!
Click here to check out my YouTube video all about my weekly cleaning routine!!
Links
Carpet Refresher-https://a.co/d/079fbqsc
Bona Mop System-https://a.co/d/0aL5scK2
Baseboard Cleaning Tool-https://a.co/d/01zal2Cz
Tile & Tub Scrubber-https://a.co/d/0jfpuYBy
Stainless steel cleaning spray-https://a.co/d/07NPuZEH
Dusting Spray-https://a.co/d/08SFA7d5
Microfiber cloths-https://a.co/d/0e7sUw2W Dyson vacuum-https://a.co/d/0cten1Mp
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