Everyone likes a clean home. Not everyone likes to clean. Not everyone seems to have the time to clean. Whether or not you enjoy the process, keeping your place clean is necessary. Its better for both your physical and mental health
I am a clean freak. When the place isn’t clean, my stress levels are through the roof. Not much stresses me out, but dirtiness does. The problem is, I live with two very messy roommates, and I have absolutely no time slot to dedicate to cleaning the apartment every week. My schedule just simply has no room for a cleaning day. I work three jobs, go to school full-time, and spend at least 10 hours a week volunteering. For a while, I really struggled with managing to keep the apartment clean, but then I came up with a new plan. Since then, I have managed to keep the apartment tidy, and my stress levels down. My plan won’t fit your schedule exactly the way it does mine, but here are some tips to come up with your own cleaning plan:
1. Make a list of the tasks you need to complete in order to have an entirely clean apartment (i.e. vacuuming, dusting, windexing, etc.).
I never schedule cleaning for Monday, because this is my most hectic and exhausting day of the week. Sometimes I do end up sweeping the floors or something, but I don’t stress myself out if I don’t get to it until Tuesday.
2. Split your tasks into different days of the week, or open time slots in your schedule.
- How many rooms do you have to clean? You can make a plan to clean one room each weekday, so that by the time your weekend comes, you have a spotless place. Maybe you have time to clean two or three rooms one day and only one room the next. Do what works for you.
- Would you prefer to split your cleaning schedule into tasks instead of rooms? Maybe you want to dust all rooms on Tuesdays, vacuum on Wednesdays, do kitchen on Thursday and bathroom on Friday. Design a schedule that fits your life.
3. Accept that there will be days when no cleaning gets done.
- Sometimes life just gets too overwhelming to find the time to clean after work or school.
4. If you are anything like me, you like to have at least one day a week completely free.
- I always finish all of my cleaning by Friday afternoons, so that Saturday I can focus on volunteering, and Sunday I can have some time to relax. I found that I preferred powering through my exhaustion after class during the week in order to clean, so that my weekends were free of any cleaning obligations.
5. If you have the money, it wouldn’t hurt to invest in one of those robotic vacuums.
- They are much more useful in one-level apartments, and are most useful if you have pets. Floors take up a lot of time to keep clean. Vacuuming once a week is almost never enough, but not everybody has time to do it more than that.
- Investing (perhaps splitting the cost with roommates) in a robotic vacuum means coming home to clean floors every day, which means having one less thing to worry about. You are still going to have to clean the floors every so often, but at least the filth won’t build up during your busy week.
Hopefully these tips will help you keep a clean home! I found that after I broke my cleaning schedule up into different days, my roommates (who HATE cleaning) were more motivated to help out sometimes. So whether you are busy, or just hate to clean, cleaning a little bit per day might be the solution for you!
P.S. I also love this 5 minute daily cleaning routine my fellow blogger Sarah has suggested. She has a detailed weekly cleaning calendar that you should check out, too. And cleaning is tough without some tools, so check out this post by Chloe for the basic 5 starter cleaning tools everyone needs to have and this one for environmentally friendly cleaning products.
Very well and precisely written, it all comes down to making a good schedule of ones responsibilities and by it making the time for everything.