Changing Housework Routines with Changing Schedules, and a Printable

Guest post from Anne Simpson

Different seasons of life require different methods and approaches to house-keeping, as I recently discovered. For the (almost) six years I’ve been married, I have kept to the same exact house-cleaning routine with few variations:

Monday: Cooking and Baking for the week

Tuesday: Laundry

Wednesday: Kitchen (stove, microwave, floor, refrigerator)

Thursday: Bathrooms

Friday: Dust & Vacuum

This procedure served me well and kept my weekends free for fun and church while still getting everything done. Plus, if the kids left me alone played quietly together for long enough (ha!), I could wipe out the day’s chores in less than an hour.

Until now.

Now, after 6 years of an established routine, I’ve had to change things up (It turns out, you can teach an old dog new tricks!), because I just recently took on an additional obligation that keeps me out of the house 3 days a week, 2 hours at a time.

I know, I know, 2 hours a day, 3 days a week, is only 6 hours out of a whole week. Does that really crimp my housekeeping style so much?

Why yes, yes it does. This extra obligation happened to be the proverbial straw (you know, the one that broke the camel’s back?) that seriously left me questioning my sanity in even accepting this obligation. I strongly considered going back on my word and getting out of it, because I had already been struggling with this little matter of housekeeping.

I’ve found that what works for a newly married wife and the stay-at-home-mom of an only child does not necessarily work for a blogging, teaching piano, home-schooling work-at-home-mom of 2 boys, who just recently decided to add yet one more thing to her crazy schedule. After wracking my brains and stewing in distress over what I should do, I approached my husband about my concerns regarding the housework, and he gave me a simple solution (husbands are so great for that!)

“Let’s just get it all done together on the weekends”, he said. And the golden words, “I’ll help you!” Sweet, sweet man. So glad I married  him!

So after (almost) 6 years of successfully (more or less) executing a flawless house-keeping plan of action, I am now learning that there is more than one way to skin a cat. Er, get the housework done.

My new schedule is this:

One load of laundry every day. Set it going at night, dry it and fold it and put it away at some point before the clothes are needed promptly the next morning.

General housekeeping – straightening, dishes, trash, etc. – done every day as I have time (which is pretty much only at nap time!).

Cooking and baking prep for the week is still done on Mondays.

Then on Friday evening or Saturday evening (whichever works best into our schedule that week) is when we do all the big stuff: cleaning bathrooms, cleaning the major appliances and the floor in the kitchen, dusting and vacuuming, and scrubbing floors.

I’m sure that this plan will change again at some point in the future. Maybe one day when my children are older and more independent, I will actually have the time during the day to get the chores done. Or maybe I’ll just have the kids do the chores and sit around and eat bon-bons. At any rate, this is what works for me now, and I’m happy with my husband’s simple solution. And I’m grateful for his help.

In case you’d like to try my plan of action for yourself, I’ve attached the printable checklist I made for our weekend clean-a-thons. It’s pretty generic in that it can be usefully applied to pretty much any house and any schedule, so print away!

Chore Chart: Weekly Chores Checklist Printable