If you follow me on Instagram, you might have seen a little sneak-peek of this cleaning chart early last week. I am a self-professed procrastinator, especially when it comes to housework or laundry. I wish I was that girl who cleaned house and cooked dinner while wearing pearls, but I’m just not. Before children, life was easy. There were only two people to think about, an abundance of time and very little mess to clean up. After Ella came along, things were a little more involved, but there was still plenty of me to go around. These days, we’re killing each other to get out the door in the morning, we have three hours of dance each week, church activities, Josh is helping to coach JV football, there are family responsibilities, grocery shopping and an endless number of errands to run. Hey! Did I mention we both have full-time jobs? Most nights, it’s hard enough to get dinner on the table and squeeze in bath and homework before bedtime. I’m overwhelmed just considering what chores need to be done.
A few weeks ago, Josh asked me if we could come up with a cleaning schedule for the house. Not just dividing the chores between the days, but designating responsibilities and making sure that you aren’t sloughing your work onto someone else. We sat down last Monday night and made a list of all household chores and how many times a week they needed to be completed. We then divided them up among the week and assigned them to one of us depending on our schedules for the week. On Mondays, I grocery shop so my light needed to be lighter. On Tuesdays, Josh works late and often has football games, so he didn’t need anything that couldn’t be completed in between work and practice. I’m not home at all on Wednesdays, but I can manage unloading/reloading the dishwasher before bed. Neither of us wanted anything strenuous to do over the weekend, but we knew we wanted to enjoy a clean house, so we designated Thursdays as the “heavy cleaning” days. We also added a few monthly tasks to weeks three and four, like vacuuming the couch cushions and wiping down the doors and baseboards.
I’m sure that jobs will fluctuate seasonally and we’ll realize something we missed. At some point, the girls will be old enough to take over some of these jobs and the sole responsibility of the parents will shift. For now, they are responsible for picking up their rooms, hanging up backpacks and lunchboxes, getting their laundry to the appropriate location, feeding/watering the dog and letting her in/out to use the restroom.
One thing that seems sort of self-explanatory (but that we haven’t been doing) that we are implementing is how we process laundry. That job has to be done on a daily basis to ensure that we have clothes to wear and sheets to sleep on. In the past, they both piled up and required one person to spend far too long playing catchup. We toyed around with how to distribute this task, but in the end we decided to use a “rotating” method. Someone is responsible for laundry every weekday. On your day, you aren’t required to wash every stitch of clothing or make sure it’s even all put away. You just have to rotate the laundry. You fold and put up what’s in the dryer, move the wet clothes from the washer to the dryer and start a new load.
I can already see a huge difference in how our house is managed in just one week. It smells better, looks better and I’m not embarrassed if someone drops by unannounced! At worst, it might have been a few days since we vacuumed, but at least our guests won’t have to navigate the mountain of laundry in our living room floor. And thank you, Jesus, that my husband doesn’t complain about being the sole recipient of the bathroom and vacuuming duties. I’ll gladly wash dishes and fold laundry an extra day in return.
I got several comments on Instagram and facebook, so if you’d like a copy of the excel spreadsheet we created to track your daily chores, click the contact button and I’ll send one your way!
