Ultimate Guide To Mastering Your Cleaning Schedule

There are a multitude of house cleaning schedule examples all over the internet. Isn’t it so annoying when you see all these different cleaning hacks, tips, and tricks everywhere that make cleaning your house seem so easy?! 

You can download all the free cleaning printables you want, but if you don’t know how you like to clean or what cleaning style fits you, you’ll never follow through on someone else’s cleaning schedule.

Now don’t get me wrong..I love that there are all these cleaning routines that you can gather ideas from. And printables. Who doesn’t love printables?!

But these are all schedules and routines that work for someone else. Sometimes they have too much listed and it overwhelming when you try it. Sometimes they don’t have all the areas of your house. What are you supposed to do if it doesn’t fit in? Just skip it?

When I really started focusing on developing my weekly cleaning routine, I turned to two places. Pinterest and Youtube. There are so many cleaning videos on Youtube, if you haven’t checked it out, you’d be totally surprised!

This started to overwhelm me! How is it that these people do so much every day and every week? In a 10 minute video?! I know I know, there’s a lot of editing involved. But I’m subconsciously expecting that same time frame.

I knew a couple of things starting out creating my house cleaning schedule:

1. I did not want to spend all day cleaning
2. This process had to be simple or I would never do it.

I tried doing the things that all these people did and it never worked for me. You’re probably wondering why it’s not working for you either!

It’s because there are different cleaning styles! WHAT?!

I thought cleaning was just cleaning… NO, my friend!

I’ve noticed that there are 2 different cleaning styles:

1| Looping Cleaning Style

The looping cleaning style has cleaning tasks that need to be done. But if you miss a day, then you just do it the next day. The tasks are not confined to a particular day. It’s just one after another. It’s not focused on days but more on the tasks involved.

This type of schedule and style is based on a cycle. You just keep going to the next task. This schedule is perfect for those who don’t want to feel restricted. IF you can’t get to something today, you don’t worry about it because you can do it tomorrow. This type of schedule would be ideal for someone who has an unpredictable schedule. For example, if you have different days off of work, week to week.

To sum it up: task oriented

2| Scheduled Cleaning Style

This scheduled cleaning style has cleaning tasks assigned to each day of the week. You clean what is supposed to be cleaned on that day and that day only. If you miss that day, then the next time that area will be cleaned is the next time around. This is perfect for those who like to know what is happening on what days so you can plan for it.

To sum it up: day oriented

Once you know what cleaning style you prefer either the flexibility of looping or scheduling, you can move on to step 2: figuring out your cleaning schedule.

Geez! This seems so complicated just to develop a cleaning schedule!

Yes! These all affect the way you want to handle it!

 

House Cleaning Schedule:

Whole House Cleaning:

You will take one or two days and just clean the entire house from top to bottom. Now, this may work for you if you know you’ll be home and you have the time. A pro is that you are in the cleaning mindset so you can just get to work and be done. But this will take most of your day. This is tough if you have little ones at home and you aren’t able to do anything else besides cleaning for those days.

Batching:

An example of batching is to pick one cleaning task and apply that to the entire house. If one day is a dusting day, you dust all the surfaces of your entire house. If the next day is vacuuming, you vacuum the entire house.

 

A little every day:

Break down the major tasks to do a little bit every day. This is easier for those of us with little ones as we are able to finish the tasks during nap time or while they are playing since it doesn’t take as much time. This is also a little less overwhelming since it can be finished in a shorter amount of time.

 

 Room by room:

Would you rather clean one room at a time, then move on? You can set each day to clean one or two rooms from top to bottom. This works for those who like to completely start and finish a room before moving on. The only thing I don’t like about this option is that you are pulling out all the cleaning supplies, and vacuum, etc, every single time you need to clean.

 

Final option for those who just need a break:

..hire a cleaning service to come help you!

How often do you need/want to clean?

All the printables on the internet show a weekly cleaning schedule. I don’t know that my house gets THAT dirty. I think that if you are super busy, deep cleaning every two weeks should suffice if you are also doing daily maintenance. That’s a whole other ball game! Which will be a future post 🙂

 

My Cleaning Routine

Update (June 7, 2018) My cleaning routine: I used to be a mixture of all of the above. Who knew that could happen?! But now I am a whole house cleaner that is scheduled on Monday and Friday, every other week!

Personally, I like knowing what is supposed to be done every day that I clean. I only wanted to clean on weekdays and I knew I didn’t want to even clean every day and most of all I didn’t want to clean 2 days in a row. 

So, I batch clean our downstairs living space on Mondays which is our living and dining room, kitchen, powder room, and kids play area. The space is not big enough to spend multiple days on but small enough to be able to clean in about 2 hours. We have laminate and carpet so I can vacuum the entire floor at one time. Then mop the laminate areas at once.

The upstairs gets cleaned on Fridays which is all of our bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, and loft space. This is a heftier day of cleaning. But I am loving just cleaning 2 days a week, every other week. The week in between is just a maintenance week. 

 

Bi-Weekly Cleaning Schedule

Week A

Mondays : first floor and stairs

Fridays: second floor

Week B

Mondays: Quick bathroom clean and floors

Fridays: House project!

Now, I don’t stress if I don’t clean it every week. Life happens. Stuff happens. There are no cleaning police that will come to your house because you didn’t clean it this week! But the maximum I will push it is two weeks.

Why?

Because we have a dog that runs in and out of the house, we walk around the first floor with our shoes on occasionally. Most of all cleaning on a very regular schedule makes it easier to clean and maintain. Not much dust piles up, there aren’t hard water stains, there aren’t creatures trying to set up shop in our homes.

Click here to Download the workbook and get started on planning your best cleaning routine that is perfect for you!

Check out how to clean your house more quickly and efficiently with an organized cleaning caddy !!

 

Let me know what your cleaning schedule is like! Which style do you fall under?