I do not enjoy cleaning. I imagine there are many people who feel the same way as me, but there are also plenty of you out there who genuinely seem to enjoy it. In the last year or so, I’ve come up with a weekly schedule of household chores to do and actually stuck with it. But my regular cleaning isn’t “deep cleaning” by any means. It’s just basic maintenance tasks that need to be done regularly.
One of the perks of moving often is that you probably don’t have a really dirty house. The longest I’ve lived anywhere after high school was our 3.5 years in England at the start of our marriage. No deep cleaning ever happened there ha. So when we moved out, Andrew had quite the task ahead of him (I stayed in TLF with 3 month old Gerrit). But after England, we didn’t live anywhere for longer than 18 months until now.
In April, I decided to do a Spring Cleaning in the kitchen. I ended up cleaning behind the fridge and oven and on tops of the cupboards. And then I pretty much lost steam haha. I didn’t go in with a plan, so it lasted all of one day. So when I found out that Berend moved up on the wait list for preschool, and I would have a couple of mornings a week to myself this fall, I decided maybe I should try to deep clean the house. We’ve been in our house for over 3 years now, and I figured the nooks, crannies, and unseen areas were probably getting gross.
So I started with a list. A very long list. I went room by room thinking of everything that should be cleaned, wiped down, organized… you name it.
Then I came up with my plan in terms of what days I was going to work on my Fall Cleaning. I was originally just going to do Tuesday and Thursday mornings, but I figured that would take forever (like all fall!), so I included weekends as well. Once I assigned a room per day (some rooms got multiple days… like the kitchen) it ended up being about a month total. This works well for me, because I need to work in manageable chunks of time and space. Some people are able to knock out their cleaning in one weekend, but I would lose steam too quickly for that. As soon as I start thinking “this is good enough,” I know that I’m losing my momentum and need to take a break. Plus I’m working through rooms on top of my normal household chores, taking breaks to be a mom, and make meals.
I will be following up every week with my progress so I can share my lists of tasks and remember as many “helpful hints” that I pick up as I go through each room. Who’s ready to get cleaning??
On An Even Kiel 