Hey guys! It’s Amber again and I’m back and this week, taking a little time out from the DIY’ing to give you a cleaning schedule you’ll actually be excited about. I post regularly about DIY projects, crafts and family life on MotherhoodMusings.com, and you can find me and all my stuff over here!

Now this…this is the mack daddy cleaning schedule. One that you might actually have a prayer of sticking to. If you are anything like me, you are in constant list making mode. I’ve discovered that being a list maker, doesn’t actually mean I’m an organized person, it means I’m trying to organize my UN-organization. Of all my “lists” I’ve made, a handful of them I have actually done, completed or stuck with. I’ve made cleaning schedules before, simplified, itemized, illustrated, all of which have failed.

I recently got inspired from a post I found here. What you want to do first is, sit down with a nice cup of coffee while the kids are napping. Grab a notebook and a pencil. At the top write: Daily, Weekly, Biweekly, and Monthly. After that you want to write down EVERYTHING that needs to be done in your house on a monthly basis. This may take a little time, and maybe a quick tour of your house to remember the little things that need to be done.

I described it to my sister like this, write down everything you would tell a maid to do if you had endless possibilities. Make sure that you are assigning them to which category they actually need to be in, not the one you would like for them to be in. (i.e, don’t put bathrooms everyday, cause we ALL know you ain’t doing that!) This has been my #1 problem before, I would add mopping every single week, because I would love for my house to be mopped every week. But in reality, that’s not going to happen, and I set myself up for failure. So now that I know my bare requirements, I am more likely to stick to it.

Once I had everything written out, I started to find that I didn’t really need for my daily chores to go on my calendar because they come so naturally, but if that’s not you, put them on there! Mine are very simplistic, hopefully I can remember to wipe down the kitchen and pick up at bedtime. This is what mine looked like:

Once you have everything written out, decide what days you want to do each weekly chore. If you have more than 5 weekly chores, you can either choose to add them to Saturday & Sundays or add more than one to each day. I arranged my schedule so that I am not doing ANY cleaning on the weekends, hallelujah, so my Mon-Fri has more than one weekly chore on it.

Make up a mock 4 week calendar (yes, some months have 5 weeks, I’ll touch on that later) on another scrap of paper to start adding in weekly chores on the days of your choosing. After you disperse each weekly chore to a day of the week, move on to the biweekly chores if you have any. Decide which two weeks of the month you want to do your biweekly chores and add them to a day of the week that has more of an easier weekly chore to go along with it (i.e dusting).

Once you’re done with your biweekly, move on to the monthly. Add each of your monthly chores to ONE day of the whole month to get those accomplished. Some of my monthly chores include, cleaning out the microwave, washing kitchen rugs, etc. I also added meal planning onto my Sunday, because I do not want to do any cleaning, but meal planning only requires some thought.

*Disclaimer* You are not allowed to judge me based on my biweekly bathroom cleanings or monthly sheet washing. I’m making a schedule I will actually stick to, not one that my momma would approve of!

Make sure you are making your day choices based on something you will actually stick with. For instance, I will NOT mop and do bathrooms on the same day, I’m too lazy, uh, I mean busy, for that. So I know if I schedule those together, it won’t get done. I even went as far as to schedule my less popular (aka, most crappy) biweekly chores on opposing weeks, so no two biweekly chores got put on the same week. Of course this worked out nicely because I only had 4 of them. Once you are satisfied with your monthly layout, start transferring it to a calendar that’s pretty. Cause’ we all know we don’t wanna do this cleaning, might as well be on cute paper. Like the calendars I posted on my blog, here.

Mine turned out, that if all goes well, I will be doing 1 hour, at most, of cleaning each day, and my house will stay clean (technically speaking) on a monthly basis. And I purposely gave myself some easy days so I know those are coming in the week. As far as the 5 week months go, this is up to your personal preference. You could just restart your 4 week process on that 5th week, but I decided this would throw me off too much, so I decided on those months, the 5th week would be a “easy” week and I would only do bare necessities and none of the extras. My necessities include laundry, vacuuming and making sure the bedrooms stay clean.

Good luck making your schedule, and remember to give yourself a break… who cares if the house gets messy from time to time, as long as you’re making memories!