As a homesteader, your plate is full! Tending animals, a garden, keeping the family’s bellies full of food, and the daily mound of dishes… and the house as a whole needs a cleaning probably more often than you want to give it. I get it! And I’ve also let go of some expectations in my own homemaking. In this post, I’ll share my weekly cleaning schedule and how I keep my home clean(ish) most weeks while homesteading, homeschooling, and attempting to keep the home too.
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Not everyone cares about a clean house the same way
I’ve heard many times how “homes aren’t museums” and “those little messes soon won’t be little kids anymore” or something like that.
And they are right! Boy, are they right… Time flies so fast with little ones.
But I’m also not the Creator of my brain. God is. And He made me one that simply cannot sit and enjoy anything when the house is a wreck, a mess, whatever word.
When the house is chaos, my mind is chaos. And I have found the reverse to be true over the years as well.
If you’ve made it this far and think to yourself “I couldn’t care any less how messy or nasty my house is!” then this isn’t the blog post for you.
This is for the homemaking mamas, the homesteader, the homeschool parent, mix and match those or not. The women who are trying to keep a home, their family, a small farm, and their sanity.
Enjoy this delicious CHOCOLATE CHIP BANANA MUFFIN RECIPE, mama. You deserve it.
Childhood expectations
I grew up in a two parent working home. Both parents worked full time outside of the home (80s baby raised in a 90s world) while me and my sister were at daycare and then eventually school.
Our mother, being the creature of habit she is, had a very thorough and not-to-be-deviated-from schedule of homemaking events each week. She was not a “homemaker” in the twenty-first century definition but she still kept a home even while working outside of it.
It went something like this:
Thursday– grocery day after work
Friday– begin cleaning or yard work
Saturday– all day top to bottom house cleaning and yard work
Every day– a list of chores for us kids written on the back of a piece of mail.
Are you Gen X or a millennial? Can you relate to that?
And I do mean ALL DAY on Saturday. From early morning (we may have been able to sneak in a Saturday morning cartoon or two before we were sent to clean our rooms and the Columbia House CD tower took center stage for the rest of the day, blaring the best of Motown) until dark.
Every surface was sanitized. All bed clothes washed. All clothes laundered, dried, folded, and put away same day! Not a dust bunny to be found as every single item, picture frame, and piece of furniture must be moved to be dusted and vacuumed under every week.
And when she lit that Yankee Candle on the bar top, you had better make sure you didn’t make no mess the rest of the evening in her sight!
This is how I lived the beginning of my own independent young adulthood.
(If she ever reads this blog post, she hopefully will laugh at the accuracy and not get upset for me blasting her to the world.)
But then I started my own family
And that is when we became a one income family and me a new stay at home mom. A homemaker. With no prior example to look up to or for advice.
Even with “all the time on my hands” now as a SAHM, I couldn’t quite do the clean all day Saturday thing anymore. With a baby who wanted to be held all the time, it made any cleaning a little harder.
Husband helped out a lot which was great in those early months of figuring out how to be a mother and also a good wife. It was a lot just to keep the dishes and bottles cleaned and dinner cooked most nights. Vacuuming floors and scrubbing toilets got done in tiny nuggets of time I could find.
My home cleaning expectations HAD to change.
The Weekly Cleaning Schedule
About 11 years back, I was scrolling Pinterest and stumbled on a way to keep the house clean one room at a time each week or do a small task each day. I was intrigued.
Simply put: just clean one room or do one task a day Monday through Saturday for about 15 minutes a day.
Monday: sweep & mop solid floors
Tuesday: bathrooms
Wednesday: dust
Thursday: vacuum carpeted floors
Friday: pick a monthly task
Saturday: make up day
Monthly Tasks included things like wiping down kitchen cabinets, baseboards, cleaning out appliances, cleaning glass doors, ceiling fan blades and air return vents, etc.
Each day’s task could be done during nap time or if it was a loud task, while the husband spent a little time with the baby after work. Fifteen minutes was all I needed to put a good cleaning on that one area or to do that one task.
And it made a huge difference!
Here’s why I chose those chores on those days
Sunday is a day of rest for our family. The weekends are spent mostly outside doing homestead things and outside chores or just enjoying the great outdoors. But we are also in and out of the house a lot. Meals still need prepared.
Monday is a great day to clean up those floors from the weekend in and out as all 4 of us are home and sometimes we have company over.
Thursday is great for bathrooms because though we don’t host often, it seems when we do it’s later in the week and weekends. Making sure the guest bathroom is cleaned up well before hosting folks is a must. The “guest bathroom” is also our children’s bathroom.
The others can be swapped around or made up on Saturday if needed.
I admit that there are many weeks when I skip a lot of chores and so Friday or Saturday becomes make up day but generally it takes less than 2 hours to get caught up.
How does this schedule help the homesteader?
As a homesteader, your daily schedule is already full!
Likely you have mouths to feed that aren’t just human mouths.
Living things depend on you! Even if it’s only a garden right now. You still have to water, tend, weed, harvest, preserve, and more! That takes a lot of your time, particularly in the spring and summer.
Because time is valuable to the homesteader (well, time is valuable to most people), efficiency to the homesteader comes in a very close second.
How can I complete this task well in the least amount of time?… is generally asked internally of one self as a homesteader looking at any project before him.
This weekly cleaning schedule is how! Time block 15-30 minutes a day and set a timer. Know your plan of action (the FREE PRINTABLE chart in this post will help) and get to it!
It may help to set aside the hour of day in which you know you can complete this cleaning task daily. Maybe it’s 10:00am every day or maybe it’s 4:00pm. You choose. Then be consistent with it. Set a daily reminder if need be.
The Weekly Cleaning Schedule Downfall
If you’re Type A or a little OCD about your cleaning, this may not be the schedule for you.
While I am considered Type A-ish, this schedule was a God-send. A permission of sorts to not have to spend a whole family day on Saturdays cleaning the house top to bottom.
The downfall is this: the house is never fully clean at one time. Only certain areas or rooms are clean at one time.
Whether you clean a little every day or a lot in one day, there will ALWAYS be dishes and laundry every single day that need attention which is why they are not listed in the chart available here. Those are a given.
The one room at a time cleaning schedule
In the last 13 years of being a SAHM, I’ve bounced around with my cleaning schedules. I do love a clean, organized, tidy home. Not realistic with small kids so I learned to do the best I could.
I’ve done the all day Saturday cleaning marathon days. I’ve stuck with the weekly cleaning schedule for a while, and then I tried the one room a day cleaning schedule.
One room a day looks just like it says: clean one room in the house a day.
Monday may be the entire kitchen.
Tuesday may be the master bedroom (dust, vacuum, change sheets, pick up, etc.)
Wednesday may be the living room (dust, vacuum, fold blankets, put away things, etc.)
Thursday may be the bathroom.
Etc. as your home needs… You get the idea.
This didn’t work for me though I gave it a good go for several years while I worked from home in my direct sales business while homeschooling two children and starting up our homestead.
I found excuses not to clean that day…
a lot of days…
in a row.
So when I found the day to clean up, it was generally Friday or Saturday and I spent the whole day on it. By the time I was finished, I was exhausted. Too tired to cook dinner or spend quality time with the family.
That’s an easy recipe for burn out.
Cleaning help from the children
As your children get older, they will be able to assist with chores and keeping the house orderly and tidy.
As members of this household, our children contribute to the mess so they, too, contribute to the cleaning.
Children helping to keep the house clean can start very young. In fact, they LOVE to “help” clean at very young ages. Let them!
Simple tasks for a 1-3 year old are things like picking up toys to put back in the basket, “folding” blankets, picking up their room, putting away some dishes, and even wiping the dinner table.
As they get older and stronger, you can teach them how to push a vacuum, use the Swifer duster, hold the broom at the right angle, wash a dish. Around age 6 or 7, you can begin teaching them to launder their own clothes.
Teaching and Showing is important
Teaching by demonstrating intentionally is how children learn to clean up after themselves and how to do the cleaning/sanitizing properly.
Show them like it’s an actual homeschool lesson how to properly scrub the toilet and sink and in WHICH ORDER! Which cleaning tool or rag is used for which area and which cleaning agent to use.
You don’t want your child to use the toilet brush to scrub the kitchen sink! Don’t assume children know the significance of this– teach them.
READ MORE: Safer Cleaning, a list of non-toxic cleaning agents your children can use too
Enlist the children’s help with the Weekly Cleaning Schedule
Every child has their own contributions to cleaning in our home.
It starts with their own bedroom then whatever they have brought into other areas of the house. Crayon boxes, jackets, toys, blankets, etc. If they brought it in here, they take it back where it belongs.
At 13 and 9 years old, our children have age appropriate chores inside the home and on the homestead. Call them chores, a checklist, or contributions, or something else entirely… to me, it doesn’t matter the name.
Teaching your children how to help and why they are needed to help is key to cooperation.
You will find it takes patience, gentleness, self-control and ALL the other Fruits of the Spirit.
Is this relatable?
If so, I feel you, Mama.
What are your family values?
We have a few priorities here at Johnson Home:
Jesus first, family second, work third and all else will fall into place. We appreciate good quality family time, uninterrupted.
Because family time is important to us since Dad works outside of the home, we prioritize time well spent together. And if Mom (me) is going to be full invested in family time too, the house has to be in some sort of order.
What’s your cleaning schedule like?
There is so much more that could be added to this post or even more that could be modified depending on our family structure and dynamics. Of course I do not know what your family situation is like so this may seem like absolute ridiculousness in the season of life you’re in.
Or it may be JUST THE THING you need to try in order to feel on top of homemaking and homesteading!
I personally know when my brain is chaotic, the chaos/mess in my home is amplified! And it makes me feel like a crazy person. Keeping the home tidy since we are here majority of the time, me and the kids, is important to my overall well-being.
I’d love to hear in the comments what your cleaning schedule is like! Maybe you’ll inspire me to do something different.
Or if you have more questions about how or why I choose to do the weekly cleaning schedule, comment that below too.
FREE PRINTABLE WEEKLY CLEANING SCHEDULE
Save this image, print it, and write in your plan of action!
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