Happy first day of May, friends! With the start of a new month comes the start of a new theme for the next four weeks. This month is: Spring Cleaning. So, throughout the month I’ll be looking for ways to tidy up, clean, declutter, purge, etc.
I don’t know about y’all, but I’m the type of person who feels better, functions at a higher caliber and gets more accomplished when I’m organized and when my home is clean. So, I’ve decided this month is finally the month I started cleaning on a consistent, organized schedule. I’ve been so inspired lately by a few bloggers that I love following (A Bowl Full of Lemons and Clean Mama) and I’ve sort of taken their systems and put my own spin on them. I’ve mentioned it before, but when we moved into this house in February, I immediately started to feel overwhelmed by its size in terms of chores. To give you an idea – we went from a 3 bedroom, 2.5 bath 1,750 sq. foot house to a 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath 2,800+ sq. foot house with 3 floors and 2 bonus rooms. Not only that but we use pretty much every room in this house.. and we use them often. But even if your house (or apartment) is closer in size to our first house, I feel like a schedule of chores is beneficial for us all!
What I love about the idea of planning out a cleaning schedule is that it lays everything out and makes cleaning every square inch of our house actually seem manageable.
With all this in mind, I thought I’d go ahead and share my May cleaning schedule with you all in case you needed a little inspiration during this spring cleaning season!
Daily and Weekly
Weekly
As I said, this system is a culmination of tips I’ve picked up from both abowlfulloflemons and @cleanmama. ABFL takes more of a week-by-week, month-by-month approach to cleaning, while CM assigns a specific chore to a specific day of the week and puts that on repeat. Now, I completely see merit to both systems, but I thought I’d try ABFL’s cleaning card system first (for no other reason than I found hers first!) to see how I like it. Maybe next month I’ll try Clean Mama’s – we’ll see 😉
You can read about ABFL’s cleaning cards in more detail here, but the jist is this: I started with a list of all the rooms and areas in our house and wrote beneath each room all the things that would need to get done (i.e., vacuum/mop, dust furniture, clean windows, tidy drawers, wipe baseboards, etc.). I put how long I thought it would take me to accomplish the cleaning of each room at the top next to each room name and grouped them together how I saw fit. Each group represents a week of the month and is assigned its own color. Here are mine:
I really like this system because I like the fact that you can see on each card how much time you’re about to spend cleaning. I don’t know, it just makes it seem less daunting to me when I think about it. I can put the baby down for a nap, grab a card that only takes 15-20 mins and know that I’ll still have an hour to do something for myself. Know what I’m saying? It also helps to realize that cleaning a bathroom is only going to take you 20 or so minutes. I think sometimes we work up cleaning in our heads because we feel like it takes so much of our precious time when, in reality, if you just resolve to get it done, you could accomplish everything you need to in less than an hour.
Daily
So, where does the daily come in? Both ABFL and CM iterate that there are daily chores to be done aside from what’s on the ‘schedule’ per say. Which may or may not go without saying. The things on my daily list include: spot cleaning floors, dishes, wipe down counters, clean the baby’s highchair and do at least one load of laundry. Yours may look different! I’ve also added an “Every Saturday” section to my cleaning schedule to remind me that there are a few things that I’d like to make sure get done on Saturday’s as well: wash everyone’s bedding, give the bathrooms a quick tidy/wipe down and bathe the dogs (which in all honesty will probably be more like an every other week thing).
My May Cleaning Schedule
Here’s a PDF of my actual cleaning schedule for this month. If you’d like to follow along on the day-to-day, follow me on instagram and check my stories often!
If you’d like your own editable version of my calendar, just enter your information in the form above! **as a disclaimer, this will deliver an automatic email with the calendar AND opt you into my weekly newsletter. I will NEVER abuse, distribute or share your information** UPDATE: if you sign up now, you’ll receive a calendar that’s been updated for the current month!
We are having a little housewarming dinner party with close friends this Saturday, so I decided to make this the week I do most of the heavy lifting. Basically, I plan to accomplish a thorough cleaning of the whole downstairs so it’ll be fresh and clean for our get together!
So, I’m curious – if you’ve stayed to read, this sort of thing obviously intrigues you? Would you consider following along with me this month and/or making your own schedule for kicking housekeeping butt this month?
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