Household Cleaning Binder

With spring officially upon us, and spring cleaning in full swing around the blogosphere, I thought now would be the perfect time to share with you all how I organize my household cleaning.  I had originally planned to develop and share my cleaning schedule with you guys when I made my home management binder.

However, I must admit I got stumped trying to work out how exactly to organize all the tasks I wanted to accomplish to keep my apartment spic and span.  I also decided I wanted to separate the cleaning section into it's own binder, to keep things streamlined and simple.

One of the mistakes I made while trying to develop a cleaning routine was trying to do everything.  I am a full time student, who only needs to maintain a one bedroom apartment.  Yet I was trying to develop a cleaning schedule to rival Martha's.

I finally came to terms with the fact that I did not have 5 hours a day to devote to cleaning.  Once I made the decision to reel myself back in, the process was really simple.  I just had to sit down and figure out exactly what needed to be done, and how much time I could realistically spend cleaning each day.

I have always been partial to cleaning using the 'zone' method.  This involves rotating which area of the home get cleaned each day of the week, based on it's 'zone'.  I have 5 major rooms in my apartment, which each count as their own zone.  I then added two more zones, floors/trash and laundry.  This gave me enough zones to spread out to each day of the week.

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When scheduling which zone would get cleaned on which day, I made sure to keep my schedule in mind.  Since I have classes pretty much all day Tuesdays and Thursdays, Melissa volunteered to take over those days.  We assigned each zone to a day based on how much free time we had, and how much time it would take to clean that zone each week.

After figuring out a basic weekly schedule, I also wanted to have a page where I could see and check off a list of all tasks that needed to be accomplished for each zone on each day.  This is what tripped me up a lot when I previously tried to make a cleaning schedule.  In addition to having way to many tasks per zone, I also made the mistake of making a separate checklist page for each zone.  This meant I needed 7 pages of checklists each week, and 30ish each month.  I was not thrilled about having to flip through all those pages to find the one I needed each day.

That first system wasn't easy to follow, and it was definitely way to bulky.  So during my second attempt, I decided to try and make a checklist that covered an entire week of chores.  This turned out so much better than my original plan.

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This is the only page I need for an entire week of cleaning.  There are seven boxes down the page, one for each day of the week.  Then I have all my daily tasks listed on the left side of each day, and all the weekly tasks for each zone listed on the right of each day.

This makes keeping up with my cleaning so simple.  Instead of sorting through 30 or so pages to find the one I need, I just flip to the current week's page whenever I'm cleaning, and I'm good to go.  I also print these pages double sided to try and save even more space in my binder.  This has been wonderful.

The last step was to include all my monthly cleaning chores.  Since some things only need to be cleaned once a month, and others need a deep cleaning every month as well as weekly upkeep, this is a necessary part of any cleaning routine.  I decided to designate the first week of each month to be the week that I do the monthly chores.  So the first 7 days of each month I follow my monthly routine, and the rest of the month I following my weekly routine, if that makes sense.

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For the week that has monthly tasks, I made up this printable to simply replace the first week's weekly schedule.  It has all the monthly tasks listed down the right side of each day.  Since some areas do not need deep cleaning on a monthly basis, I kept a few of the weekly tasks in the middle to still complete during the 'monthly week'.

Hopefully that wasn't to complicated to follow.  In case it was, this next page may help clear things up.  I made up a complete monthly schedule for April, so you can follow along my cleaning routine if you want.  Each day tells you what zone to focus on and what type of cleaning (monthly or weekly) to complete.

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I'm planning on making one of these monthly schedules each month, so let me know if you'd be interested in me sharing these each month on the blog.

Whether you're hoping to tweak an existing cleaning routine, or you're starting from scratch, I hope my schedule helps you towards creating the perfect cleaning system for your home.  All of the printables I shared in this post can be downloaded for free by either clicking the link in the captions, or by going to my new cleaning printables page.

So do you think you'll be following my cleaning schedule?  How do you clean your home?  Do you also do a zone method, or do you clean by type of chore (vacuum, dusting, polishing etc.)?  I'm always looking for ways to improve my systems, so feel free to share any tips or tricks you may have in the comments below!  And for more cleaning inspiration, you can find tons of goodies on my cleaning Pinterest board.