Dog hair! Dishes! Dust! A home that is well lived in with people and pets has to be cleaned. As the mother of nine children with two black lab dogs, I know about messes and the battle of keeping a house clean.
As busy moms, some with part-time jobs, housecleaning is a never ending quest. We know our homes are better clean, we know we are happier with tidy abodes but many times cleaning just isn’t on the top of our to-do list. We know we shouldn’t have clutter and a nice and neat home is more conducive to a less stressful environment but how do I motivate myself to clean and how often?
These tips might be helpful:
Make a master list: Whenever I have organized my cleaning time in our home, I would make a master list of what needs to be done to keep a clean house: wash windows, dust furniture, mop floors and clean toilets. Take a thorough tour around your house to find all the jobs that need to be done so nothing gets unnoticed and write them down on a master list. List by room or by job, which ever you like but create a master list.- Post on Index Cards: Weekly, monthly, semi-yearly and yearly cleaning tasks are best kept on colored 3×5 cards. Buy a pack of colored 3×5 index cards and list all monthly, biyearly, and yearly jobs from your master list on a card or two with any details needed about the job. I do a card for each room as well as marking how often. Then using different colored cards, write the months of the year—one on each card—and list on that month what cleaning job you have decided to do. Punch a hole at the top left hand corner of the card and place a metal ring through the hole. These cards are kept nice and neat and you can hang them up with your house keys as a reminder. You can even tab the cards by month so you can find them easier or tab the cards by room and take one card a day by room and finish an hour every morning or whatever time you allow.
Decide what time frame: Or try this: once the master list/color coded cards are established, chores can be organized by time frame. Everyone knows that a carpet with pets running free need more vacuum time than a home with no pets so think about the needs you have and plan accordingly. Group cleaning jobs by task to be done daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, bi-yearly and yearly. Be sensible about cleaning tasks by what gets the most traffic in an area. For example, my children’s bathroom needed to be cleaned twice a week because of all the traffic, yet my laundry room only needed a monthly clean.- Create a Simple Chart: Or maybe this might work: You can create a simple chart to be hung in common areas for everyone to see. This can be a chart of all the daily and weekly tasks for all family members or just a list on a laminated board showing what day of who does what so everyone knows what needs to be done.
- Insist that children participate: You might be laughing to yourself by now at how ridiculous all of this is but we have to at least try to make an effort to clean our homes. In a perfect world all children will want to help but the reality is Mom (and/or Dad) is actually the one to keep on top of the cleaning. No matter what age your children are (over 3 years old) they can help. Teaching children to follow through on cleaning tasks might be difficult in the beginning but as you consistently keep to your cleaning tasks, your house will look and feel much better. Your children will learn to take care of where they live and what their responsibility is and when they are older will understand what it takes to maintain a home.
- Motivation: Now that you have all of your cleaning jobs listed by month and what needs to be done on a master list so you don’t forget, motivation is the key to success. It might help to find another mom you can trust to help clean to do it together. This would be really great motivation for me: someone else I can clean with in my own house and then go to their house and do the same. It would always get done faster and you are not the only adult cleaning.
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Building Strong Families
To read more of Valerie’s articles, click the picture.Reward yourself: Treat yourself to something special and it doesn’t have to be costly. It can be some “me time,” as in a walk in the park (you might have to take children), or reading a book as a break from your day, or whatever it is you like to do but reward yourself. Creating a clean home for some might be reward enough, but for me, I want to do something to keep myself motivated to keep going throughout the year.
It doesn’t have to be the end of the world to keep a consistent house clean or a children’s cleaning schedule. It just takes some motivation and organization and then reward for doing a good job. Children will see how happy you are that they helped and you have the added accomplishment of a clean house as well. Housecleaning is not the end of the world. Well, not for most people.
Valerie Steimle has been writing as a family advocate for over 25 years. As a convert to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she promotes Christian living in her writings and is the mother of nine children and grandmother to twelve. Mrs. Steimle authored six books and is a contributing writer to several online websites. To her, time is the most precious commodity we have and knows we should spend it wisely.
To read more of Valerie's work, visit her at her website, The Blessings of Family Life.
