I mentioned in my last post that one of our New Year’s resolutions-but-not-really is to introduce a new cleaning schedule. Brian and I are serious procrastinators. I don’t know how it happened because most of my life (well through the end of high school anyway) I was usually on top of things. Somehow, things changed and that’s no longer the case. Brian and I also hate cleaning (although, who likes it really?) and aren’t huge fans of cooking. Some days we wake up and find the dishes piled so high that if a robber came in our house, they’d probably leave out of disgust and take nothing. Okay, not really, but sometimes I wonder.

Speaking of robbers – we woke up this morning and our back door was wide open. Apparently we accidentally forgot to lock the door last night and the wind blew it open. We found some cat throw-up with some random plant in it which is clear evidence that my cat went on a little exploration last night. She’s an indoor-only cat (please please please keep your cats indoors people) so she’s never really had a taste for outside before. I was just so glad that she came back and was safe in our house this morning! I also think one of the neighbor cats ventured into our house at some point in the middle of the night because our dog was sniffing one spot in our bedroom like crazy. The whole thing really freaks me out, but I’m trying not to worry about it too much or I’ll just obsess over it. I’m sure we’ll never forget to lock the door again, though! But, I digress.

Back to our new schedule. I’ve been working on this for a few weeks on and off.  I started off by hand-writing out all of the tasks that we try to do around the house and the tasks that need to get done, but don’t. Brian and I then took a look at the list and marked which items were daily tasks, weekly, monthly, or seasonally.

I then created a google documents spreadsheet and assigned the various tasks to various days of the week. I’m super excited to get started with this, and I really think it will help us out. Not only will our house stay cleaner, and the chores will get done, but I think we’ll actually spend less time cleaning…or at least it’ll seem like it. In the past, we’d always end up having these marathon cleaning sessions just because we put off cleaning for so long. We’ll end up spending an entire day (or two) playing catch up and then we both get annoyed with the situation and become grumpy people that no one wants to be around. Hopefully, by doing a little every day, we’ll avoid those long dreaded days. Below is the schedule we ended up with (click on it to see it at full size).

Now, with a young baby I have a feeling it will be a little tough to stick to this schedule 100%, but I’m going to try. I’ve already told myself that I can’t beat myself up if it doesn’t happen exactly as planned, but I’m lucky in that I have a husband who helps out with (and has time to right now) chores quite a bit. We decided that we will write down each chore on a popsicle stick, and then each Sunday we’ll draw to see who has to do what that week. I’m trying to be optimistic about this and am hoping it works out! I’m planning to blog about how our first week goes.

I want to make note that we have a pretty small house – so things like vacuuming daily aren’t a big deal to us. We can vacuum our family room and two bedrooms in about ten minutes. Also – the reason we are vacuuming daily is because our allergies have been pretty bad lately, and we find that when we vacuum daily, it really helps. I can’t wait until we buy our first house and get all hardwoods. I seriously despise carpeting (and it’s got to be one of the most non-eco-friendly things out there, right? hmmm idea for a future blog post? I think so.)

I’d love to hear about your weekly cleaning schedules…what works for you? What doesn’t? Please feel free to post your ideas in the comments.

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