ROUTINE CLEANING SCHEDULE
I am not an expert homemaker. I happily place myself in the “amateur” category when it comes to cleaning and cooking. Aspiring expert, sure, but definitely not an expert. I thought I knew how to keep a clean home when I met and dated my husband, but boy, I was blind to my own mess. Isn’t that the beautiful thing about marriage though? Your flaws exposed for an invitation to holiness and becoming a better version of yourself. I thank God for my husband so often!
Cleaning and keeping a nice home has been a challenge for me, and through failure I have come to be very motivated to crack the code for homemaking. I have read many a blog and scoured Pinterest for the correct way to keep a clean home. Some tips I laughed out loud at, and others I longingly wished I had the time to accomplish what the author was promising.
And today - I am here to share I have a solution that works for me right now - with three kids ages three, one, and 9 months. The key I think to this schedule is: simplicity. I don’t have an exceptional amount of free time. I have a little time everyday to keep our home, but the part I love is it is all scheduled out.
In short, each day I have basic things I do: load the dishwasher and one load of laundry Monday-Friday. Then there are some required items each week, such as taking out the trash and filling the car up with gas, but I try to keep those to a minimum. Then - my favorite part kicks in. I have chores spread throughout the month, so that Monday-Friday I have ONE monthly chore to do each day. That’s it. Whether that is cleaning our kitchen backsplash, or doing a deep vacuum sesh of the bedrooms - it is only one thing for me to do that day.
Do I get to my daily chore everyday? Absolutely not. Many days, I do, but some days, the basics of feeding, clothing, and parenting my children is all I get done (plus a quick house reset after they go to bed, for my own sanity haha). But I also only have a daily task for the first 4 weeks of the month, Monday-Friday. Saturdays, and any leftover half-weeks of the month are great catchup days. Or I will just take a couple hours and knock out a week’s worth of daily chores. It’s totally flexible.
What I love about this model is that I am doing a little bit at a time. Small baby steps towards a clean home. I was worried at first that completing some of the tasks monthly wouldn’t be enough, but turns out months go by quickly, and knowing it will get done at least once a month is a perfect set up for my season of life right now.
It also minimizes my mental load. When I have a little free time, I am not drowning in the analysis paralysis of what could be the MOST productive thing for me to do. I have a list to go to, simply laid out for me to keep up with, catch up with, or get ahead.
Small steps towards a cleaner home. Small steps towards a healthier home. Small steps towards my “expert homemaking” status. Just as my sweet children are taking small steps, learning to run, I am taking small steps in my motherhood, and through failure, learning how to succeed.
And so - I would like to introduce to you my “Small Steps Series”. My routine blog posts will remain free to you all to read. I love writing and sharing thoughts with you all. But, I want to add a subscription to my Substack, where you can have access to a new resource each month to help make a small step towards a more cohesive interior to your home, a small step in homemaking so your interior decorating can actually shine, and a small step towards making a home that is intentional, beautiful, and yours.
For June, in case you haven’t guessed, my PDF upload for you is my Monthly Routine Cleaning Schedule. It’s a printable page that you can put on your refrigerator, or incorporate into scheduled reminders on your phone. In it I share my daily, weekly, quarterly, and monthly routines for cleaning. And let me tell you - if I can at least keep up with some of it, you absolutely can to!! I don’t have the major monthly cleaning down since that is more of a family effort, but progress over perfection, everyday.
To sign up for the monthly subscription, click the button below. I hope you’ll join me!!
If the monthly subscription isn’t something that is accessible to your budget right now, no worries, I get it! Every monthly PDF will be uploaded to the Shop on my Space Stylists & Co. website, so you can pop on over and just get whichever downloads you need without the monthly commitment.
I hope this resource is helpful - don’t use it as a comparison metric, or another layer of pressure to your life. It’s a Small Step - and when you put a bunch of those together - progress follows.
Chat soon,
