My new cleaning system

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

First off... this looks much more complicated than it really is! My SIL learned this from a lady's mother in her ward and she finished hers and showed it to me. IT. IS. AWESOME. I feel so organized. I think my house is cleaner for just having finished this little project! :)

The whole idea is you assign each day specific areas of your home and on those days, you just do surface cleaning. For me.. that's basically putting stuff in their place OR those cleaning things you do FRANTICALLY before someone is making a surprise visit :)

Then, you pick 2 days of the week to do your deep cleaning. I chose days where my weekly duties were lighter than the rest. That is where this little sheet below comes in. I split my home areas up into 6 different areas equally. Then I proceeded to list every single thing that would need to be done if I were moving out. Pretty much things I never clean until I have to move. Embarrassing I know. :) This was the hardest part.


Then, I took each of those duties, from each of the 6 sections, and evenly divided those into 8 parts. (in the picture, you can see there are enough for each Wed/Sat a month) So this ensures that at least every 6 months you are cleaning those pesky baseboards (that in my house don't get cleaned until I move - except for the bathroom. Those get cleaned every time I clean the bathroom! Yuck..)


I put them in a fun cheap little Target photo book. January and July are paired together, same with February and August, etc. I just move these little cards below into their places when that month comes around.


Below is Tuesday. Kind of a normal day without any deep cleaning but I also added cleaning out the fridge as a weekly duty so nothing gets left/lost in there for too long. :)


I originally had Wed/ Sat as my deep cleaning days but since it actually worked out better for me, I moved it to Thurs/Sat. I make sure I put all the deep cleaning duties that Clint needs to help with on Saturdays. After I finish my deep cleaning duties for that week, I take that card and move it to the back (in the same slot - there are 3 cards behind it that you can't see)


I love love love this!! And I don't feel stressed out about it. Who cares if I don't get my deep cleaning done for this week. I'll do it again in 6 months and that's a ton better than not doing it at all!! :) It's personal for me and my house which I also love. Whenever we move someday, I'll probably do it again since the rooms/spaces will be different. Start to finish, it was quite a bit of work but now I feel like when my home gets too out of control to clean all at once, I feel like this offers a good start to getting me back on track. Especially if I lose my steam/go on vacation. :)

Progress

Thursday, March 10, 2011

We're really bad at refinishing furniture. This project is taking F.O.R.E.V.E.R. Buy oh boy am I falling in love with it! We've learned so much too. We thought we would save money by buying flat paint in our color choices and then finishing with a top coat of satin polyurethane. Stupid stupid STUPID. If we had just paid a little bit more for satin finish paint, we'd be DONE right now! But it's going to look awesome!! All that is left is to polyurethane the shelves and drawers and then find hardware for the drawers and hinges for the door on the front. Our poor kitchen has been our makeshift garage for the last 3 weeks. I want my kitchen back! Sorry for the blurry cell phone picture!

Here's the before.


ALSO, I'm trying to get Clint to help me make these side dressers/nightstands for our bedroom next. He's kind of burnt out on painting too.
But I love them too much!!