As a little girl I loved to play "House Fairy" - I would wait until I had the house to myself and I would clean top to bottom before anyone returned. It was a huge stress reliever to me and I loved to surprise my mom. To this day, I've always preferred to clean from top to bottom in one fell swoop and I have a hard time picking up things on a daily basis, because I'd rather have it very messy to be able to pick it all up and feel more accomplished!
As the years have gone by, with the addition of career and children, it has become increasingly difficult to have the time to be able to clean from top to bottom at one time. I found that I was getting more and more overwhelmed, while the house got messier. Thank goodness for my husband who excels (almost to the extreme!) at putting things away. I always joke that I don't lose things despite the mess, unless he's touched it! Then I have no clue where it went.
As I've been on this maternity leave, it keeps becoming more and more apparent that I need to change my all or nothing mentality of being able to have the time to clean the house from top to bottom. I didn't realize it though until one day, during a Pinterest search, I came across this wonderful blog A Bowl Full of Lemons and this post on daily cleaning. Clean daily? My heart started racing. I can't imagine having the time. But it made me start looking into other schedule examples. I thought, maybe I will give this a shot, see what I might be missing and if any of this could help keep a more orderly house.
Some of the examples seemed too excessive for me and I was worried I'd fall back into my old habit where I'd aim to be perfect and then abandon ship when I failed. But in searching for the perfect schedule, what I found was my own.
I decided to use the example below as the basis - it wasn't as daunting as some of the others and I felt it was a good place to start.
Source: http://savingdollarsandsense.com/cleaning-schedule/
The 'Daily' made me nervous - most of the schedules had similar items - but the thought of sweeping daily made me groan. And laundry - come on!
I also put a basket at the bottom of my stairs with the intent that throughout the day anything that belonged back upstairs would go in there and as we headed up for bed with the kids I'd take it up and put stuff away. Clutter is my downfall. I think tables and chairs make great "stuff" holders. I know deep down this drives my husband crazy! So he might like this one.
I am going to give this a try for two weeks to see how it works and if it's something I can keep up with.