A House Cleaning List for the Average Home - Yours

A house cleaning list is the first step to building cleaning schedules that will give you control over your time and sanity! Because we all have different standards of clean, and different amounts of available time, our schedules for cleaning house need to reflect those realities.

To help you to do that, I put together a house cleaning list of common chores by room. I also suggested an optimal and minimum level for each one. The 'optimal' level is for those of us with smaller homes or households, higher standards of clean, or just more available time. The 'minimum' standard is the least you should probably aim for to be fairly certain that your home is clean enough to be reasonably healthy even if you might not win the 'Mrs. Clean' award..

To see the list, download the attached PDF.

Set Priorities

To make the best use of this list, download the PDF. For each item on the house cleaning list, choose a cleaning frequency that will result in a combined standard of clean and workload that you can live with. This is the first step towards creating a house cleaning list that will help you to get control over your home.

Click here to read the PDF in your browser, or right-click to download it.

Build Your Custom Weekly House Cleaning Schedules

We are going to use your house cleaning list to build a 4*6 inch card for each day of the week. Each card will have some daily, some weekly and some monthly items.

Before getting started, you might want to decide how you are going to schedule your week. For instance, I decided that I would not do anything other than 'daily' cleaning activities on Sundays and Mondays. My Sundays are busy with church and friends, and Mondays I'm generally pretty tired. I also chose to spread the cleaning evenly over the remaining 5 days, with a slightly heavier load on Saturdays. You will need to figure out the same kind of general skeleton on which to hang your schedule.

Are there any days when you know that the most you will be able to accomplish is the minimum daily activities? Don't plan anything else for those days. It's important to be realistic, to set yourself up for success.

Here's how I did it (in case you can't tell - I'm a big fan of Post-it notes)...

1. I got a package of multi-colour Post-It Notes (thank you 3M)

2. Cleaned off the kitchen table

3. I chose a different color for each cleaning frequency (blue for daily, yellow for weekly, green for bi-weekly, pink for monthly...) and fill them out with the appropriate cleaning items

4. Put seven Post-it's across the table - one for each day of the week

5. Start by placing the 'daily' activities

6. I pulled the Sunday and Monday piles out of the way, since I knew that I wouldn't have the time or energy to do anything else on those days

7. Then I added the weekly activities - trying out different combinations to see what would work best for me. In the end, I decided to do all the main floor (kitchen, bathroom, master bedroom and living room) cleaning over Wed - Fri,the second floor (bedroom and office) on Tuesdays, and the basement(bedroom, bathroom, laundry room, storage room, rec room) on Saturdays. This provided the basic structure for the remaining items

8. I took the remaining items and distributed them as evenly as I could until I had something I thought would work for me

9. I transcribed everything into the cards, and posted them on my fridge

10. I use my cards as a guide, but sometimes I don't quite keep up. So far, believe it or not, no one has died and my house hasn't fallen apart

I have my cards posted in magnetic photo holders on the fridge, but you could put yours in a section of your recipe box, or punch holes in the cards and put them on a ring (laminating would help them last longer). 8. I took the remaining items and distributed them as evenly as I could until I had something I thought would work for me

9. I transcribed everything into the cards, and posted them on my fridge

10. I use my cards as a guide, but sometimes I don't quite keep up. So far, believe it or not, no one has died and my house hasn't fallen apart

I have my cards posted in magnetic photo holders on the fridge, but you could put yours in a section of your recipe box, or punch holes in the cards and put them on a ring (laminating would help them last longer).

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