Cleaning House: Taking Back the Weekend

Fair warning: you are about to read a blog post about my house cleaning habits.

I am not a big fan of doing housework, but who is? It occurred to me last weekend that I really hate spending part of our weekends trying to keep up with housework.

So I started thinking about why I hate doing housework. What to do? A list to the rescue! I took a little time and put together a pretty comprehensive list of all the cleaning that needs to happen on a weekly basis, and all the things that need to happen monthly:

Weekly items are things like:

- wiping down the kitchen appliances
- dusting
- vacuuming
- combing the shedding hair off of the dog
- straightening up the office
- cleaning the bathroom mirror, faucets, countertops, etc.
- tidying up the bedroom and putting away clothes
- cleaning out the fridge

Monthly items are things like:

- bathing the dog and giving her the monthly dose of medicine
- cleaning the bedroom closet

I picked up a cute (and inexpensive!) 8.5x11 frame from the dollar store, and framed the list to hang in the kitchen. I grabbed a cheap dry-erase marker (that sits conveniently on top of the framed list) and it makes it really easy to keep track of what we've already done, and what else needs to be accomplished.

Here's our list! As you can see, most of our stuff is checked off just from the little bit of time we took to do it while dinner was cooking:

So what was the next thing I hated about housework? I realized I'm really not a big fan of doing it on the weekend. I mean, the weekend is for running fun errands, taking the dog to the park to run around, sleeping in, cooking, reading, and watching endless episodes of TV shows on Netflix. I could do without the tedious house stuff. My solution? Go into the weekend with an already-clean house! It's hard to sit around feeling guilty about the messy bits in the house if it's already clean. So for the next little while, I'm going to try to do our cleaning on Thursday nights. That should leave Friday nights, Saturday, and Sunday wide open for the more relaxing and fun parts of the weekend! This past week, I set aside about 20 minutes, and in our little townhouse, was able (with Kevin's help) to take care of almost everything on our weekly list.

And thanks to our super awesome Thursday night cleaning spree, I got to do some other (significantly more fun) things this weekend:

- go to the chiropractor
- eat some tasty sushi on the back porch while enjoying the sunshine
- start reading A Song of Ice and Fire
- soak in a nice hot bath. I added a half-dozen drops of rosemary essential oil to the water while it was running, and it made it smell heavenly
-cook a delicious dinner: top sirloin steaks with roasted broccoli rabe and sautéed shiitake mushrooms in a balsamic and caramelized shallot glaze, with a touch of goat cheese to make it creamy.
- take a couple nice (short - but nice) naps in the mid afternoon



So much more fun than cleaning....