Cleaning Systems

We live in a fairly large house with a lot of people.  Several years ago, in the midst of a debilitating pregnancy, my husband and I came up with a system to help us keep our house clean.  It has been pretty incredible and worked well for us.

At the time, we had 4 older kids capable of taking on bigger cleaning roles.  We divided our house into 4 zones, trying to factor in how messy they could get.  We have the following areas:

Kitchen

Basement

Family Room, Mudroom, and Guest Bath

Entry, Living Room, Stairs, Upstairs Hall

Each child is assigned a zone for the week, although I’ve been toying with the idea of assigning the zones for a longer length of time.  During the week, the kids are responsible for keeping their zone picked up.  This usually happens after school, or in the morning during the summer.  It is one of the things they have to get done before they can play.  Then on Saturday, the kids are responsible for deep cleaning their zone.  This means dusting, vacuuming, mopping floors, polishing appliances, and cleaning bathrooms.  Each zone has a detailed cleaning sheet printed out and hanging in the zone to help them know everything they need to do.

It has taken effort to teach them how to deep clean well.  When we first started checking them off on Saturday, there were many things that had to be redone because they weren’t done well.  There were a lot of tears and frustration that accompanied these corrections.  But now, they can do a pretty decent job cleaning.  There are times where they “forget” about certain tasks, or they might sometimes try and get away with sloppy work, but for the most part, our house ends up looking pretty shiny by Saturday afternoon.

Like all of the systems we’ve started in our home, our cleaning system took a little bit of time to create and train our children in.  But the effort always pays off in the long run.  I frequently thank my kids for their hard work and point out how long it would take me to do all of it by myself.  They know that because we all work together to get the work done, it allows us to have more time together to play.