When I was a kid, my mother cleaned the whole house once a week. (Not that she didn’t clean up anything in between) I mean all the dusting, vacuuming, bathroom cleaning, floor mopping, EVERYTHING on ONE day. As I got older I was assigned a lot of it. It takes a lot away from a Saturday morning when you have to clean the whole house. Not to mention what happens to the house if you miss your cleaning day.
Well, with homeschooling, that definitely does NOT work for me. I’ve divided up my housecleaning into manageable chores each day. I also have them scheduled a little more often than is absolutely necessary because I’d rather clean a not-so-dirty toilet twice than a nasty toilet once. Overall I think it’s less work too.
So I don’t clean my bathrooms on the same day as I vacuum. (And if I didn’t have kids assigned to clean some of the bathrooms, I wouldn’t even clean them all on the same day.) I don’t mop the kitchen the same day I change sheets. What do I gain from this?
Cleaning takes smaller chunks of time.
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A house that is never totally dirty.
(It’s never completely clean either, but I can live with that. How long would it stay completely clean anyway? 5 minutes?) It’s definitely working for me.
My house is never completely clean but never completely disasterous too. I find housework is my biggest challenge.
I'm more like your mother. I clean on Friday afternoons though so that I can have the weekend with a clean house. Then I also try to do a pretty decent cleaning on Monday morning really early before we start school. Anyway, today is my day to clean, and at the moment, I wish that I had broke it up into smaller chunks and didn't have so much cleaning to do right now…. Better get off this computer.
I do tend more toward your method, though. I would have to have dad or someone else literally take my kids for half a day to even make the once a week cleaning effort worth it! Otherwise as soon as I finished cleaning one room, it would begin to be dirtied again!
We do try to tackle sections of the house or specific areas like bathrooms plus sweeping and mopping of hard floor areas together! Then another day we might vacuum plus catch up on folding laundry. This seems to work better for us, too.
this is helpful advice. I grew up in a home with a mom that was a perfectionist. She cleaned EVERTHING on Saturday, plus shopped for groceries and cooked. She also held a full time job. As a child, I never felt that I was as important as her perfect house and grew up with a deep sense of resentment. Thank you for BALANCE for homeschooling moms. I look forward to your blogs.
I’m glad you find that tip helpful 🙂