Cleaning schedule

Cleaning schedule

I’ve been thinking a lot about organization and cleaning lately. To be honest, keeping the house clean is just not something we’re very good at, and it drives both of us nuts. I always think if I can just figure out a way to make it easier or part of our routine, we might finally conquer the mess.

Ever since I saw this post by Jenny Komenda at Little Green Notebook a year ago, I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind. Holy moly. A cleaning schedule! It blows my mind. I like to say I’m the most organized messy person you’ve ever met, so this is the kind of thing that makes me really excited! Seriously, like, I LOVE this stuff. Here’s Jenny’s schedule:

WOW.

But is it practical for us? Between being at work 50+ hours every week, working completely opposite shifts and in my case a different shift every day, plus blogging, socializing, being generally lazy the rest of the time, would we ever be able to train ourselves to put something like this into practice? I honestly don’t know. I imagine it working for about a week before we lose track, but I’d certainly love to give it a shot and see if we could do it.

Andy and I have been trying a few things lately, figuring out how to divide up our chores and work together to get them done. One of the things we’ve realized is that Andy is better at putting things away and I’m happy to get them cleaned. So we’ve decided that I will be in charge of filling the dishwasher and all of the hand-washing, and Andy will be in charge of putting away all of the clean dishes. We’ve been doing this for a few months now and it’s working really well. Where we used to have dishes piling up for days and didn’t have a system in place for who would do them and when, now we stay on top of it almost constantly, and spend less time doing so.

Last week we started an experiment to see if this plan would also work for laundry. I have a terrible habit of leaving giant piles of clean and dirty laundry on my bedroom floor because I hate folding and hanging, and all the piles end up getting mixed up and I can never find what I’m looking for, and it’s wrinkled and… well, you get the picture. I’m a mess. The new experiment is that I will do all of the laundry for both of us and Andy will put it away. Up until now, we’ve always been responsible for our own laundry, so this is way different. If it ends up working, it’ll make a huge difference in our overall organization — not to mention stress — except there’s a chance I still might not be able to find anything… maybe I should label all of my drawers…

What do you think? Do you follow any sort of cleaning schedule or have a really good plan that works for you and your family? I would love to hear it in the comments. We need all the help we can get!

{ image by Little Green Notebook }