Purpose in the Little Things: Cleaning Checklist

This post is part of a series of posts I'm doing about our journey in home management and homeschooling. You can find the first post and links to the rest of the posts here. 

  Have you seen this e-card?

This is true. My friend texted me other day to tell me she had just gotten down on hands and knees to scrub the kitchen floor. And then her kids spilled half a gallon of apple juice. Isn't that always the way?

Even so, we all know that the housework needs to be done. Even if it's very quickly undone. Even if it's repetitive and never-ending.

We sometimes complain about this, but author Rachel Jankovic points out that we might complain less if we thought about this repetitive work the way that a pianist thinks of practicing or a marathoner thinks of training. It's necessary, and it makes us better.

In the past year, I've come to appreciate that housework is so repetitive, because it has allowed me to create predictable processes for getting it done.

Right now, I do not have a day that I can devote entirely to cleaning. I can't do that when all the kids are here. They just aren't able to hang with it yet. So right now, I have a cleaning schedule.

I use the term schedule loosely (like I always do). There are days that we typically devote to cleaning certain places in the house (Mondays we clean the bathrooms, Wednesday, the bedrooms, Friday, the basement). Sometimes our schedule shifts slightly, and I shuffle things around. And sometimes it's just me looking at what needs to be done most.

I made a little checklist of all the things that need to be done in the week. It looks like this:

There are things that we do daily (like emptying the dishwasher) and things that get done weekly (like cleaning the bathtub). When Daniel saw it, he joked that he needed to pay me more.

There are several big categories that the cleaning tasks fall into: bathrooms, bedrooms, floors, the basement, dusting, and the van. I will typically pick one of these categories to work on each day, assigning some of the tasks to the kids. I highlight those tasks so that I remember what I'm trying to accomplish that day.

Ideally, we would get all of these things done in a week. Most weeks we don't, and that's ok. We still get way more done than we used to.

I find that having this list helps me in a few ways:

First, I'm less likely to look at the mess and think "AAAAHHH!" (Direct quote). This list helps me find a starting point, and break the things that need to be done into manageable chunks.

Second, things don't get as out-of-hand when I am dealing with them on a fairly regular basis. It's far less overwhelming to think about cleaning the shower and takes much less elbow grease to accomplish it if it's only a week's worth of gunk.

Third, I know what I need to be working on in the small chunks of time I have. I don't have hours of free time in a day, but I might have 15 minutes here and there. I'm far less likely to waste those pockets of time I have some direction.

Our house is very rarely completely clean; it sees a lot of use and time is still in short supply. But things get done on a more regular basis and we are never as far from completely clean as we once were. Having a cleaning routine has helped me immensely, because I think the hardest part for me is just knowing where to start. So even though the crumbs are falling to the floor as I sweep them up, most of the time they do actually get swept up. I guess brushing your teeth while eating oreos is better than not brushing at all.

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If you'd like a copy of this checklist, you can find it here:

Weekly To-Do