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Life's too short to clean your own home

I received this flyer in the mail. Actually, I've received a few of them and I have to admit -- they really got my attention. So much that I haven't thrown one away yet.

It certainly wasn't the design of the flyer that caught my eye. The outdated stock photo of the dad with the 90s hair leaves something to be desired. (wait -- did they have laptops in the 90s or did this bad haircut exist in the 2000s?)

But the slogan is really catchy. Life's too short to clean your own home. I love it. I have a very similar slogan. Actually, it's almost identical. Just remove the second part of the sentence.

My motto has always been "Life's too short to clean." Period.

Those of you who know me well know that cleaning and keeping a clean house is not one of my strong suits. It never has been.

But I believe we are all works-in-progress and I work hard to try and improve my weaknesses. This desire to get better at cleaning my house became more of a necessity when my son started crawling and now walking running through the house, finding every out-of-place object on our floors and tables.

For those of you who don't know me very well, I want to be clear that I am not a hoarder. I don't live in filth or collect trash. I'm not a dirty person. Just messy. As of now, I would be a terrible role model to my son as far as cleaning up after myself is concerned.

As I mentioned in my last post, as I'm growing older, I'm learning more about myself and about the importance of getting myself organized, planning ahead and making lists. I want to do the same for cleaning.

I want to change my cleaning habits by putting together a cleaning schedule for myself and I want your help. I have been scouring the web (namely, Pinterest) for examples of chore lists by day, week, month and year.

But I'm still trying to figure out what makes the most sense for me. Since I have been more of a "party cleaner" in the past, I don't even know where to begin. Do kitchen floors and bathroom floors need to be mopped (or scrubbed on your hands and knees as I've been doing lately) weekly? Or is this something you can get away with every other week or even longer if you sweep and swiffer in between?

How often do you clean your toilets, scrub your floors, vacuum your carpet, change your sheets. What about cleaning out your refrigerator and microwave? Do you have one day designated to cleaning each week, or do you try to do a little each day?

I would love your feedback and am excited to share with you my progress with this task.

Yes, life may be too short to clean your own house, but it isn't going to clean itself, either.

Comments

Unknown said…
I love this post. I have my messy moments but I am overall clean. I have a schedule in place and I have found that if you clean as you go there really isn't much to clean. I throw in 1 load of laundry a day usually right before I go to bed and I switch the laundry in the morning when I wake up. This keeps me on top of laundry. I also do the same with dishes, we rinse and put them in the dishwasher all day long and before bed I start it. I usually sweep 1-3 times a day depending on how big of a mess my girls make. I mop 1 once a week along with the bathrooms. I usually do the bathrooms bright and early just a quick scrub down before I get in the shower myself. At night I make sure everything is in its place before bed too.. I seriously spend 20 minutes before bed starting laundry and dishes, and straightening up what I need too. Throughout the day with the toys the girls play in the morning and clean up before breakfast, lunch, dinner, and sometimes before bed if there was time to play after bath time. It took me about 6 months to come up with a schedule that worked for me. I am not a morning person and at first I tried doing things bright and early but would end up sleeping through it. Play around with a schedule and see what areas work and do not work.
1/14/2014 10:27 PM
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