Making a Home Cleaning Schedule

Starting next week, we are going to be tackling projects around the house that we've been putting off. Before we can start to really get things in shape, however, we have got to come up with a daily/weekly routine that will help us keep things under control once we get it that way. There are A LOT of great resources out there on how to create a daily or weekly home maintenance/cleaning schedule. Google and find some for yourself or feel free to use the ones below.

Your first step needs to be to make a list of all the jobs that need to be done in your home daily, weekly, and monthly/seasonally. Here are some resources to help you:

Fly Lady's Weekly Checklist- Click on this link to see a sample list of all the weekly tasks that you may need to tackle.

Another great resource You can also go to this site to read an article on how to set up your weekly schedule and see some sample templates. To me, that seems a little complicated, so here's what I've done.

After you have your list, you have to put it into a format you can use.

When I first decided to make a weekly schedule, I assigned tasks to certain days. It was very elementary and looked like this:

I got it from here. It had a section for each day, tasks my husband agreed to do, as well as my zone cleaning tasks (FLY lady).

This schedule can work great for someone who has a pretty regular day-to-day set time to clean/work around the house. However, with two small kids, we've found that our schedule changes a lot depending on what activities we're doing that day. This time around, I've made a different schedule.

Instead of plugging in all the tasks onto their assigned day, I just listed each of the daily tasks, the weekly tasks, and the monthly tasks along with my zone cleaning tasks (from FLY lady).
Here's a picture of what mine looks like now:

I created it in Microsoft Excel. Here are some closer views:

I took this list and placed it into a clear plastic cover. As I finish a job each day, I use a dry-erase marker and check it off. At the end of the week, I erase my marks and start over again the next week.


No matter what format you decide to use, start today listing the jobs that you know need to be done. Then, create a list of when you will do them, or a usable checklist that you can use to monitor when the jobs get done. This is one of the first and most important steps to us getting our homes under control.