Clean House – Keeping your New Year’s Resolution

New Year brings new hope, motivation and an overwhelming feeling of needing to get organized, and where to start. Here at Installerstore, we understand your feelings, and are here to help you complete your New Year’s Resolution to keep your home clean and organized. In this blog we will share our easy-to-use cleaning products and tools, and even tips on weekly house cleaning schedules (for all households). I have used ideas and cleaning template found on a blog article “Weekly House Cleaning Schedule” found HERE.
Keeping up with The Cleaning – “1 Room a Day”
For those of us who were not blessed with the neat gene, keeping up with cleaning can sometimes become an overwhelming to-do list or constantly playing cleaning catch-up. If readers take anything away from this blog, it should be this…. “1 Room a Day.” Even if you don’t implement the templates or weekly schedules suggested, if you concentrate on 1 room a day, you’ll considerable cut down the stress that comes along with frantic cleaning before guests arrive. I’ve found that concentrating on just room each day or every other day, it not only eliminates my stress but also helps fight my (and my husbands) procrastination.

First and foremost, determine how long you want your schedule to be: weekly, monthly, etc. Next you’ll want to make a long list of everything that you think needs cleaning. You may find it easier to make a list for each room, it is less overwhelming that grouping the house as a whole. Along with the cleaning activities for each room, you can have a complete cleaning of certain rooms weekly/monthly. You can call the less frequent cleaning activities “Deep Cleaning.” For example, you’ll clean the toilet once a week, but the bathroom will get a deep cleaning once every month. The time line for basic cleaning activities (like cleaning the toilet) will vary from household to household. Feel free to determine the frequency of tasks to whatever is reasonable to you.
If you have multiple people in your home, such as a college house or if you have children, you can delegate people to tasks. If you are feeling even more compulsive, you can assign specific tasks to specific days. If your son Timmy has sport practices Mon, Tue and Wed, assign his cleaning chores to later in the week. The most important part, is to put it in writing. People (yourself included) won’t remember exact tasks, or if a deep clean has been done this month unless it is documented. Get a household calendar or weekly planner, or better yet use the great excel document that I had found on the Weekly House Cleaning blog entry (there is link to download the excel file under the “How to Use My House Cleaning Schedule Template” section).
And lastly, the most important step is to stick to it. And another thing, don’t be too hard on yourself or others if you get behind on your cleaning schedule. You can always squeeze in an extra toilet scrub or scrub twice as hard on the next cycle. There are products and cleaning tools out there that can help eliminate time and energy. These include Continue reading →