5 Tips On How To Clean Your House A Little Each Day And Free Up Your Weekends!

Are you tired of cleaning your house at the weekend? Or of trying to clean your whole house from top to bottom one day per week? Then this post is for you as I’m going to share five tips to help you clean your house in stages, and give you free time at the weekend!

Interested? Then read on!

* These tips are based on the TOM cleaning method

1. Divide Cleaning Jobs Into Three Levels

The first thing to do when organising your house cleaning is to divide cleaning tasks into three levels. Level 1 – daily jobs. Level 2 – weekly jobs. Level 3 – monthly / bimonthly jobs.

In level 1, you might put things like making beds and doing the laundry. In level 2, you might put things like dusting, hoovering, and mopping. And finally, in level 3, you might add things like cleaning the oven, or decluttering.

2. Invest In Daily Level 1 Jobs

In order to be able to clean your house during the week and keep your weekends free, there are two jobs you should add to your list of daily jobs (to do daily from Monday to Friday): spot clean bathrooms and hoover high-traffic areas.

A quick word on each.

In this working week cleaning method, bathrooms are cleaned daily – a part each day. For instance: Mondays – sink and vanity + toilet; Tuesdays – floors + toilet; Wednesdays – bathtub/ shower cubicle + toilet; Thursdays – mirrors + toilet; Fridays – trash + deep clean toilet

In this method, high-traffic areas (entrance, living room, kitchen) are also hoovered each day. Although this may seem time-consuming, it will actually keep your house from getting too dusty, which will make the weekly cleaning jobs a lot faster and efficient, and enable you to have the weekend off!

3. Create A Weekday Routine For Daily Jobs (Level 1 Jobs)

The next step to keeping your house working well during the working week is to establish certain time slots for your daily jobs.

For instance:

Early Morning

• 7.15 – hang washing or put laundry in dryer (laundry in washer from night before, programmed to wash at 5 a.m.)
• 7.25 – make the beds (with your kids making their own beds, if age appropriate)
• 7.30 – spot clean bathrooms (after children have brushed teeth!)

After school/work

• 18.00 – tidy the laundry (get your children to tidy away their own laundry!)
• 19.30 – sweep/hoover floors in high traffic areas

These everyday jobs will take anywhere from 15 minutes to 30 minutes out of your day, depending on how big your house is, how much laundry you need to do, and how much your family members can help.

I usually take around 20 to 30 minutes to do all these jobs, as I don’t have a dryer, which means I need to hang all my washing. My kids make their own beds and help to put washing away.

4. Create A Routine For Weekly jobs

The whole foundation of this cleaning method is to create time in your schedule during the working week to do the general cleaning so that you’re free at the weekend.

Now, some people say it’s better just to take a day or an afternoon and clean the whole house in one go. While this may work for smaller houses, for those of us who have big houses, this method is both overwhelming and tiring.

The solution? To clean a bit each day, from Monday to Friday. In terms of schedule, you can do a 30 to 45 minute cleaning slot early in the morning, during a lunch break or in the afternoon/evening after work.

This is how I divide my cleaning routine by area/room and by day:

• Mondays – basement and garage (one 30 minute block in the afternoon)
• Tuesdays – bedrooms and corridor (one 45 minute block in the afternoon)
• Wednesdays – kitchen and entrance (one 30 minute block in the afternoon)
• Thursday – living room and stairs (one 30 minute block in the afternoon)
• Fridays – focus cleaning* (one 30 minute block in the afternoon)

**On Fridays I follow step number 5, focus cleaning. I usually do this for 30 minutes and then I spend around 30/40 minutes doing the daily jobs (level 1 jobs) as on Fridays I hoover the bedrooms and bathrooms, as well as the high-traffic areas in preparation for our Sabbath rest.

5. Focus clean once a week

Another thing that really helps to keep on top of cleaning is to focus on one room of the house once a week in a 8-week rotation. In the TOM method, this is called Focus Cleaning.

On Focus Cleaning day, we concentrate on one room and clean under furniture, dust skirting boards, remove limescale, and so forth. Basically focus cleaning is where you will do the Level 3 jobs.

The idea is for this to take only 30 to 45 minutes, so don’t get carried away!