Easy Housekeeping Schedule that You can Stick too

Cleaning is one of those things that homemakers dread. Unless you are the exception, house cleaning is so easy to put off and struggle to accomplish, yet it is so necessary to keep the family healthy and happy.

Perhaps, it is difficult and will be difficult until it becomes a habit and familiar to us. Someone once said that “Things are only hard because they are unfamiliar to us.” Maybe if we create a cleaning schedule and stick to it until it becomes second nature to us, it won’t be so difficult any more.

I have tried many housekeeping schedules, but none of them worked well. After digging around and looking at other homemaker’s cleaning schedules, I decided to create my own. You may not find everything mentioned here to be super helpful in your own situation of life. We all require different things, but hopefully you will be inspired or find something helpful in creating your own cleaning schedule.

How to Create a Simple Cleaning Schedule

The first thing to do is to grab a piece of paper and jot down three categories or lists…

Daily
Weekly
Yearly

Everything that needs to be cleaned in your home pretty much falls into these three categories. A great place to write this down is in a homemaker binder. This will help you stay organized as you are trying to figure out what works for you.

Daily

To figure out what goes into this category, think of what things have to be done everyday for the survival and happiness of your family. What are the bare minimum daily tasks that need to be done?

I talk more about this in my post 5 Daily Homemaking Tasks. Essentially, there are only 5 main things that I need to do everyday in order to keep an orderly home.

Weekly

The next category is the weekly cleaning list. These are things that don’t have to done everyday but should be done quite often. Here are a few ideas of what is on my list…

Fridge
Appliances
Windows
Dust
Mop
Bathrooms

I usually have a cleaning day on Mondays where I try to get a head start on these tasks for the week. Sometimes, I get them all done on that day, but not always. It really helps to jumpstart my cleaning to have a day set aside to this housekeeping task.

Yearly

After creating a daily and weekly list of cleaning tasks, everything that is left over goes on the yearly list. These are things that you might fight on a spring cleaning list like…

Walls
Baseboards
Doors
Cabinets
Dressers

And such.

I, however, cannot bring myself to commit to spring cleaning. There are too many things that I get overwhelmed before I ever start. It has been really helpful to at least for a start to commit to taking on one deep cleaning task a week instead of blocking whole weeks off just to clean.

Spring cleaning works really well for some people and maybe there will be a season where it works for me, but for now, I need baby steps.

I need something that I can easily start and keep up with. If you are like me, you might make complicated detailed lists that require a lot of mental energy just to create and then you are so tired from creating the list that you have no motivation to keep your whole system.

This is why I have narrowed it down to just three categories or lists that I can just slowly work through as I have time and if I don’t get to it in one week, it’s not a big deal. The system won’t fall apart because it’s simple and easy to jump back into.

A Few Helpful Mindsets

Have you ever found that the way you think about things like cleaning affect your motivation to do them? I know I have.

Cleaning is so easy to dread and greatly dislike, but with a few shifts in the way we think about it, we can make it simply a part of our life that we hardly think about it anymore and feel better about it.

To clean is to remove dirt.

Ok, maybe this isn’t helpful to you, but it really helped me to realize that not everything needs a deep clean. Sometimes all I need to do is do a quick wipe and if it there is no dirt to bee seen, that’s all that is needed.

Not everything needs to be scrubbed. No need to hard core scrub everything and spry it down with bleach just to make it clean. This makes it harder on yourself because most of the time, all that is needed is a quick wipe. If you stay on top of it, most of your cleaning will simply be keeping the dust off of it.

If it feels too hard, simplify it.

Doing laundry used to stress me out. It seemed such a complicated task…until I simplified it. Decluttering and reducing the amount of our clothes, breaking loads up into manageable daily loads instead of large loads all in one day, etc.

If some part of your housekeeping or homemaking for that matter is simply too hard, take some time and break it down. Simplify it into more manageable tasks.

This may take some time, but it’s so worth it to simplify things down until you feel like you can manage it.

Feelings do matter and it is so much better to not have to battle how you feel about a household task every time it needs to get done. If you can find a way to that feels manageable, this will help tremendously.

It can be done.

If cleaning is hard and feels so complicated that you put it off, then maybe consider that there is a good chance that you are doing it the hardest way.

Homemakers have been cleaning house and managing homes for ages and they probably did it a bit easier then we do so seek them out. Ask the older ladies in your community how they did it even as a young homemaker. Your grandma’s, mom’s and even mother-in-laws will have invaluable tips and advice to help you on this journey of homemaking. Seek them out, confiding in them your specific struggles.

Another good resource is to read old housekeeping books. I found many on the Internet Archive to be very helpful.

Homemakers have been flourishing even while doing housekeeping. It can be done and you can do it, too!

Don’t give up until you find what works for you.

Housekeepers need all the grit in the world. This is one of the qualities that I admire of homemakers from years gone by. They dug their heels in and faced a lot of things we can’t even imagine.

We would all do well to learn from their example and have the grit to try this or that, tweaking our routines and rhythms of cleaning tasks until it works well.

If you don’t like doing laundry or dishes or cleaning baseboards, if you don’t like it, change it. Don’t stick yourself in a corner dreading your housekeeping. Do something about it.

“Let the housewife read, investigate, and be willing to try a new method until she proves that it is better or worse than her own.” ~ Lydia Ray Balderston, Housewifery, P. 240

This may take some time to establish a process or system of cleaning that works well and that you don’t dread it so much. Just keep striving and you will flourish as a housekeeper.

Final Thoughts!

What is it that you dread about housekeeping? What cleaning task is so hard for you? Is there something that you have to do as a homemaker that frustrates you to no end? Don’t let it overwhelm you any longer.

Create a housekeeping schedule that works for you that is simple so that you can stick with it and jump back into when you have gotten behind. You can get on top of your housekeeping and stay on top of it. It is possible if you have a system that works for you.

I hope you find my simple housekeeping schedule encouraging and inspiring and that you feel like it is possible to flourish as a homemaker!

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