Cleaning house has never been something that I enjoyed or even wanted to do. Don’t get me wrong, I love having a clean house. I just do not like doing the never-ending work of actually cleaning the house. I have struggled with this my entire life.
As a child, I learned the basics of cleaning. What I was not taught was a strategy for cleaning, how to integrate it into my everyday life. My cleaning strategy was to take care of it when it needed it. Unfortunately, by the time “it needed it”, the job was so big that it seemed impossible. That would lead to procrastination. After all, if I didn’t have time to do the job right, what is the point of even starting it. Of course, this led to my house staying in a state of chaos.
It became a vicious cycle. If I knew visitors were coming, there was always the mad dash to clean, which would take hours. Once the house was clean, I would vow to keep up with it, but that never worked out. Even worse, there was always a constant fear that someone might stop by unannounced. I was a busy mom with three young boys so there was always something more important than cleaning the house. I actually hired a cleaning service at one point but found that I was doing the mad dash the night before they would come to make the house presentable enough for them.
Eventually, I discovered a website called FLYLady. FLY stands for Finally Loving Yourself. It offers a great strategy for getting a handle on housework. While I was a stay-at-home mom it was a very effective strategy. For the first time in my life, I actually had a clean and tidy home. No more fear of drop-by visitors. I actually enjoyed my home. Then I went to work full-time and it all came crashing down again. I was no longer able to follow the e-mailed prompts for what to do and when to do it. After working all day, and then taking care of the kids, I definitely didn’t feel like playing catch up on all the things I had missed doing during the course of the day.
Fast forward to today. I still struggle. I have, however, developed a strategy that, at least for now, seems to work. I have become kinder to myself. I don’t beat myself up if I am not perfect. While my house is not a picture-perfect, immaculate house, it is no longer in a state of utter chaos. How did I manage this? I have taken some of the principles that I learned through FLYLady and modified them to suit me.
Instead of going all out and devoting an entire day to get everything straight, only to feel like I don’t want to do any cleaning again for a while, I have broken cleaning up into smaller, more manageable segments. I have broken the house up into zones, entrance, kitchen, bathrooms, bedrooms and living room. I focus on one zone each week of the month. From the first of the month through the first Saturday, I work on the entrance and hallway, then switch zones every Sunday, finishing up with the living room from the last Sunday of the month until the last day of the month. Then the cycle starts again with the entrance on the first.
The zones are a part of my routine. I have found that having routines makes life easier. I have routines at work. I never have to think about what I need to do because of my routine. At home, I have a routine for when I do laundry and for how I get ready for work. I am working on establishing routines in my day-to-day life to help me with keeping the house up.
I work in 15-minute segments. That overwhelming job, that you don’t start because you don’t have time to do it all, now becomes much more manageable this way. I set a timer for 15 minutes. It is amazing what you can do in that time. Even if I don’t finish the job, I do enough that you can see a difference, and seeing progress feels good. I have also found that, while I may not finish the job today, working on it just 15 minutes a day, will get the job done over the course of the week. Not only can I keep up with basic cleaning, but I have also found that I have time to reorganize and purge things I no longer need or love.
To help keep me organized I have a dry erase board on my refrigerator. When I have special projects to do I write them on the board. I write my current zone there as well. I love the feeling of erasing items off of my to-do list. Chris pitches in too, as he can easily see what projects need to be done.
With a major move coming up in six months, I hope to use my strategy to purge things we don’t want or need to take with us gradually. I am hoping that my efforts will make the move much more manageable when the time comes.
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