Spring is officially here, which means you’re probably ready to start spring cleaning your home. Spring cleaning, organizing, decluttering, and getting ready for the warmer months are excellent ways to get your home in shape! In fact, we have a great spring maintenance checklist here that can walk you through some of the bigger projects you can be tackling. However, after you finish the heavy duty scrubbing, how do you get your home to stay clean? By coming up with a weekly cleaning schedule for you and your family, of course! In this article, we’re going to talk about what you should generally be cleaning every day and week and how to customize this to fit your life and your home.
What is a Cleaning Schedule?
A cleaning schedule is an easy way to make sure your home is always being cleaned instead of waking up every Saturday and spending hours deep cleaning everything. When you create a cleaning schedule, you create a plan for cleaning your home a little bit each day, every day. The cleaning should only take about 15 minutes to a half hour on weekdays and should be shared between whatever family members you have in your home. On weekends, you can spend a little extra time working on larger monthly maintenance. Once you divide the cleaning up between family members over the span of a week, you’ll feel like your home stays cleaner, longer!
What Needs to be Cleaned:
There are things in your home that should be cleaned every day, simply because they get a lot of use. These may not be the same for every person, but usually include:
Daily:
- Wipe Down Bathroom Counters, Fixtures
- Wipe Down Kitchen Counters, Fixtures
- Sweep Kitchen Floor
- Sweep Bathroom Floor
- Pick Up Bedroom + Make Bed
- Dishes
Over the span of the week, you should be working on these items:
Weekly:
- Mop Kitchen, Bathroom
- Mop Other Floors
- Vacuum Bedrooms
- Vacuum Family Room
- Vacuum Halls, Stairs
- Vacuum Elsewhere as Needed
- Clean Tub or Shower
- Take Out Trash
- Wipe Down Mirrors and Windows
- Dust Bedroom
- Dust Living Room
- Dust/ Wipe Down Cabinets in Kitchen
- Dust Elsewhere as Needed
- Clean Kitchen Appliances
- Laundry
- Clean Out Fridge
- Clean Toilet
Although this list seems long, between two or three people doing one or two things every day, the list seems much more manageable. Although we have a checklist version of this available to download for free, it’s important to note that coming up with a cleaning schedule is more about customizing it for what works for you. That’s why you can also download our customizable chore chart so you can create your own cleaning schedule and assign different members of your family different chores. (See below)
For items that need to be done monthly, use our month-by-month maintenance checklist.
Coming Up with a Plan That Works for You:
If you hop onto Pinterest for a few minutes, you can see that there are hundreds of daily, weekly, monthly, even yearly cleaning checklists. While those are helpful (and we even created a free download for you using our list above) for you to get started, they’re not easily customizable to fit your home and needs.
There are many reasons that your home cleaning schedule wouldn’t match a generic cleaning checklist. You may have a bigger home with more rooms that need to be cleaned. Perhaps your living room or kitchen doesn’t get as much traction as other homes do and doesn’t need to be cleaned daily. Maybe some tasks that seem simple and could be done daily are actually much larger projects in your home. Or maybe you have chores for your family members that just aren’t on these generic daily or weekly checklists. You should try different schedules to figure out what works best for you and keeps your home clean.
Here are a few tips:
- Clean when it works best for you.
- Don’t feel pressured to clean something that isn’t dirty.
- It’s OK if you skip a day of cleaning. A cleaning schedule is supposed to help you keep your home clean all the time, without putting hours of work in once a week.
That’s why we have created our customizable chore chart. You can download this chore chart cleaning schedule for free, print it out, and map out your cleaning schedule for your home for free. This chore chart has all of the chores listed below and additional spaces for you to add your own chores. It also has the days of the week and customizable cards for each member of your family, so you can detail out what chose each person should do each day. We have put all of the daily chores on one sheet so you can print them out as many times as you think is applicable for your week. You truly can customize your cleaning schedule using this printable.
Cleaning Tips:
- Keep all your cleaning supplies in an easy to reach location
- Clean spills as soon as they happen
- Put on fun music or a podcast while you clean
- Organize as you clean – or declutter and give some items away.
Let us know how you have cleaned your home with a cleaning schedule and we’ll feature you on our blog and social media!
Remember, while you’re cleaning your floors and counters, protect your systems and appliances with a Landmark home warranty. A home warranty can save you money on repairs and replacements when something that’s covered fails from normal wear and tear. Learn more about what a home warranty can do for you by checking out our home warranty plan options.