The Housekeeping Diaries: Onwards and Upwards!

Well, it’s finally time to provide an update on how my trial of a new “housekeeping system” went. The short answer? No so good.

Photo by iStock photo.For my very first system, I decided to try focusing on one room a day. Clean the living rom on Monday, my daughter’s bedroom on Tuesday, etc.

I can see how this approach could work for lots of families. It allows you to break cleaning into smaller, manageable chunks. If one week is particularly crazy and you don’t get to truly clean the dining room one week, you know you can attack it with vengeance the following week.

But I just never got comfortable with this approach, for several reasons.

• My house is small. So if I’m going to pull out the vacuum cleaner, I’m going to vacuum the carpets in the living and dining rooms, and likely the floors in the kitchen and back room, too. Same for dusting. If I get out the dusting rags, I might as well do the entire first floor.
• I’m not big on daily routines. Neither is my husband. This can be a good thing: Our schedules aren’t rigid, so we’re often up for last-minute fun and outings, and we can often help out a family member or friend in need quickly, too. But it’s bad when it comes to fitting in regular exercise, meal planning or making time for daily housework.
• I don’t like cleaning. I mean, I’m happy when I have a clean house. It makes me feel good to have items checked off my list. However, I don’t particularly enjoy cleaning, like I suspect some good people do. So knowing I was supposed to be truly cleaning the house every single day -- not just picking stuff up -- weighed on me. Heavily.

I will let you know a few things I did excel at during the same time I was struggling with the one room a day approach. I got better at hanging up my clothes every night. Well, not every night. But most nights. I made our beds many (not all) mornings. And I decided that by the time I went to bed each night, the kitchen sink would be empty, the recyclables all rinsed and in the bin, the dishwasher would be running and the counters scrubbed nice and clean – ready to be decimated the next morning!

That emphasis on the kitchen really was a revelation for me. You would have thought I was Cinderella, the way I whined about how I cleaned the kitchen “dozens” of times a day.

Now, if the dishwasher is dirty and I have the time, I still try to rinse and load the dishes after breakfast and lunch. But if they just end up in the sink, or a bunch of pans are on the stove needing to be washed, it doesn’t bother me too much – because I know at the end of the day I’ll take the 20 minutes to truly get the kitchen in great shape.  Making it something I do once a day – just part of my (dare I say it) routine? – helped my sanity.

Still, my mission to find a housekeeping sytem that works for us continues. So next up, I’m going to try the “Ten-Minute House Clean.” The details vary, but basically you’re supposed to set a timer for 10 minutes and attack a room or a problem area. Kris Pinkerton, one of our “Go West Moms You Should Know,” writes area or rooms on slips of paper, puts them in a hat, and then picks a slip out whenever she has a spare 10 minutes. I’ll be doing the same, as well as of course keeping up on the stuff that needs to be done whether you have 10 minutes or not – cleaning the bathrooms, vacuuming up the play-doh, putting the laundry away and tackling that darn kitchen every night.

Wish me luck!

Tara Burghart is the editor and founder of Go West Young Mom. On Mondays she tries to write a column called “Simple, Really?” examining why simplifying her life seems to be a complex undertaking. Occasionally she instead writes a column called "The Housekeeping Diaries," which is an effort to publicly shame herself into becoming a better housekeeper.