One thing that has really helped in our quest to enjoy our weekday evenings a bit more is to be organized about how we keep the house clean. Mr. Garland couldn’t care less if the house is messy, but if I don’t wake up to a clean and organized house, I start to feel a bit crazy. Mr. Garland seems to have selective blindness when it comes to messes around the house, so I found that it seemed I was barely keeping up with cleaning during the week and then spending a good chunk of my weekend catching up. Not fun!

We finally sat down one evening and talked about how we could fix things. We landed on the idea of a cleaning schedule, where we each have set tasks to take care of each weeknight and (hopefully) nothing left to do but enjoy ourselves and maintain things on the weekend

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(Since everyone who comes to our house asks…the “t-shirts” task is for Mr. Garland to wash his t-shirts – he prefers to have them hang-dried and I got tired of doing it for him, so now he’s in charge of it!)

We posted the schedule on the fridge and so far it’s been working great. It only takes us about 20 minutes each night to get through our tasks, and the entire house feels so much cleaner! Here’s a quick rundown of how we put it together:

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We started by making a list of all of the major cleaning tasks that need to be taken care of throughout the week. This isn’t about deep cleaning, just basic maintenance. Once we had our list, it was time to start divvying things up. I tried to give Mr. Garland the tasks that aren’t quite as noticeable if they don’t get done, and I gave myself the tasks that would drive me crazy if they aren’t done each and every week. Mr. Garland’s job often has a wacky schedule during the weeks, so there will be nights that he doesn’t get home until after Jackson is in bed – it’s hard for him to get motivated to take care of cleaning when he’s been working that long, so sometimes his stuff doesn’t get done. For that reason, I also built in a “catch up” day on Friday for those weeks where we just can’t squeeze everything in.

We were awesome about using this when we first got it set up, but have slacked off a bit over the last few weeks. I’m determined to get back on track now, though, because it was amazing for my stress level to have all of these things taken care of during the week and not saved up for the weekend!

Do you have a cleaning schedule for your home? How do you and your partner ensure a fair split of household responsibilities?