How to make a house cleaning schedule and checklist

Key Steps:

1. Divide cleaning tasks between the members of your household.

2. Split your schedule into daily, weekly and less frequent tasks.

3. Use a cleaning schedule app on your smartphone to keep track of the household chores.

Our homes are something we tend to take great pride in: a clean, well looked-after house reflects well on the owner. Most of us wouldn’t mind being judged a domestic god or goddess, solely on the basis of our interior living arrangements. So, how to develop a quick and easy cleaning schedule to ensure your home is always clean and tidy? Well, a dedicated cleaning checklist – a ‘cheat sheet’ – will help anyone keep his or her home tidy. Here’s a 4-step guide to constructing your own cleaning schedule:

Position your cleaning schedule in a prominent place in the house where everyone can see it, like on the front of the fridge – this will act as a visual reminder. If everyone still keeps forgetting to do their cleaning jobs, try using bright sticky notes as prompts. Then, no one can get away with saying that they ‘forgot’!

1. Make a Realistic Cleaning Schedule

The problem with having big ambitions for creating and keeping a tidy household is that, for most of us, our lives – and one or two clumsy cleaning disasters – tend to just get in the way.

So, before you come up with a personalised cleaning schedule, try to think about how your paper plan will measure up to reality, and adjust your expectations accordingly. Think about scheduling cleaning for the times during the week when you have a spare couple of hours and plenty of energy.

If you have roommates, a partner, or other family members in the household, then allocate tasks or responsibility for the cleaning to a single person on a rotational basis, but, again, be realistic about the extent to which that person can contribute.

2. Divide Tasks on Your House Cleaning Checklist into ‘Big’ and ‘Small’

Consider creating two or three cleaning checklists or schedules for tasks of different frequency and magnitude:

• ‘Big’ cleaning jobs that you only need to do a couple of times per year could go onto one schedule – like cleaning behind the oven and the interior of drawers, for example.

• Medium-sized tasks, like vacuuming or disinfecting the fridge, could go onto a ‘weekly’ version of the house cleaning schedule.

• ‘Smaller’ tasks, like sweeping the kitchen floor and wiping kitchen surfaces, might end up on a ‘daily’ kitchen cleaning schedule.

3. Arrange Your House Cleaning Schedule by Theme or Area

Depending on the size of your house, consider cleaning different areas on a rotational basis – so, clean the first floor one week, and the second floor the next. Or clean by type of room: one day in the week you address all the bathrooms in the house; on another you vacuum the carpets and dust tables and bookshelves, and so on.

4. Enlist Technology to Help You Schedule Your Cleaning

Not only does the Internet contain a wealth of information on the best and most effective way to do your cleaning, it can also provide suggested cleaning schedule templates and free printable cleaning checklists to help you get started. There are even apps that can provide you with a list of daily cleaning tasks, so you don’t have to think about what needs to be done next. Other apps allow you to share collaborative cleaning checklists and rotas with friends and family, so you always know who was supposed to have emptied the bins on a given day!

There you have it: with a little teamwork and organisation, you can keep your home looking its best with ease.