Do you struggle to keep your house clean?
I sure do! Golly.
Over the last decade of being the primary homemaker, I’ve learned a couple things that make it easier for me – though I know not everyone agrees:
- Smaller house. We rented a largish house for awhile, and I had a hard time keeping up with all the extra space. So much dust! So many toys and knick-knacks out of place all the time!
- Fewer possessions. The fewer things I have to organize, the longer it stays organized.
- Making the kids take their shoes off at the door. This one was hard for me, because not even my mom made us do that, but the kids track so. much. dirt. in, it’s been essential.
That said, dust and dirt still accumulate, and things still get out of place.
So for me, while there is a tie and a place for deep spring cleaning checklists, for the everyday, the solution is to spend 15 minutes a day cleaning.
I’ve said before that spending a large portion of my time cleaning is not my jam. At the end of my life, I don’t want to remember all the hours I spent cleaning, nor do I want my kids to remember me as the clean house fanatic.
And 15 minutes a day isn’t a lot, but it adds up to an hour and 30 minutes per week, assuming I clean 6 days a week, so it is significant. But this way, mixing up some essential oil-based cleaners and cleaning isn’t such a huge imposition on my daily life.
What can you get done in 15 minutes? This printable weekly cleaning checklist is an example of exactly that.
By the way, you’ll see these 15-minute cleaning blocks don’t include shining your kitchen sink or stripping your bed sheets. You can incorporate those things into your daily chores easily enough by, for example, scrubbing the sink as your dishwater drains.
Is my house clean all the time? No.
But is it clean enough? For me it is.
Is that enough for everybody? Probably not.
A large part of why 15 minutes a day works for me is because my kids are old enough to clear the way for me.
For instance, before I vacuum, or tidy the bedrooms, I instruct them to get all their things picked up and put away. When they were younger, this was a much bigger deal, but now, I typically only have to check their work to make sure they put toys in the correct places (spoiler alert, there are usually stuffed animals in the nerf gun bin).
The point is, this probably won’t work quite the same way for everybody, but the key is the same: break it down into manageable chunks, and not stress about what doesn’t get done.
There are always going to be things we don’t get to on the to-do list- that’s life.
The great thing is, you get to choose what things matter enough to you to get put on your to-do list!
That’s why this is just a template. Print it out, hang it on your fridge, use it, change it to fit your needs.
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