Tips for Getting into a Cleaning Routine

Does cleaning and general home organization sometimes fall by the wayside in your home? It’s no wonder that many homeowners find it to be a challenge to keep up with everything: Between kids, home maintenance, work, school, a marriage, friends and other obligations, keeping up with the never-ending task of household cleaning sometimes gets pushed to the bottom of the priority list. The good news is that if you get the house in good order, you can often keep it running smoothly by investing just a small amount of time each day. Here are some tips on keeping up with the housework:

• 1. Gather your family and do a clean sweep for clutter. Maintenance of the home is difficult when it’s a cluttered mess to begin with. Assign each person a room, or set up teams if you have children who are too small to do chores on their own. Arm each person or team with a garbage bag and two boxes. One box will be for items that don’t belong in said room, and the other will be for items that are to be donated or sold. Garbage goes in the bag. Set the timer for 15 minutes, and get everyone to work as quickly as possible. Then take a break and do it again as necessary, depending on how many rooms you have... and how messy the rooms are! After a final break, have everyone scurry around and put the misplaced items away.

• 2. Now it’s time to banish dirt. Once all of the clutter is accounted for, it’s time to dust, scrub, squeegee, sweep and mop that dirt away. It’s much faster to do this once there is no clutter, so it shouldn’t take too long. Once this is done, your house will be decluttered and clean, which is a great feeling. Next it’s time to learn how to keep it that way!

• 3. Make a list of all of the chores that need to be done each day and each week. These are the things that must be done in order for the house to run smoothly. Some have to happen daily, like loading and unloading the dishwasher, doing a general pickup of junk mail and other paper clutter, putting toys away and, in some homes, doing a load of laundry. Others happen every few days or weekly: Vacuuming, mopping, cleaning the bathrooms and changing the sheets are examples of this. Of course, things might be different in your house. If you have a couple of dogs, vacuuming might be an everyday chore, and if only adults living in your home, mopping might not need to be done each week. Make the list according to your needs.

• 4. Assign the chores and make a chart. This is the part that most kids dread, but it doesn’t have to be painful. Give each person who is able to do tasks a daily and a weekly chore. If you have older kids or teens, they might get two or more daily chores. This should substantially reduce your workload! Create a chart and some kind of incentive in order to keep morale up. Perhaps if all daily chores are done, then you can enjoy a movie and pizza on Saturday nights. Do whatever your family likes.

• 5. Establish regular check-in times. The issue with housework is that messes become invisible after a while. Write down on the calendar when it’s time to take a good look at what’s working and what’s not when it comes to home organization. If you do this every week or two, things won’t get too out of control in the meantime! You can also use this time to re-assign chores, decide that something needs to be done more or less frequently, and listen to everyone’s ideas about how to make the house run more smoothly.

When you have a good cleaning routine in place and things are going well, you’ll notice that things are less stressful around the house, the kids bicker less about chores, and you can feel comfortable opening the front door if a neighbor shows up for a chat. It’s worth the extra effort that it takes to get everything in order.