Daily Cleaning Schedule & Favorite Cleaning Products

Life Hacks

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Struggle with keeping your house looking presentable most days? Me too! Every mom deals with dirt but this daily cleaning schedule, along with some great cleaning products, will have your home looking great in no time!

Every mom deals with dirt but this daily cleaning schedule, along with some great cleaning products, will have your home looking great in no time!
Cozy pink vest available here and my favorite gold earrings here.

In a perfect world, our homes would all be immaculate all the time, our children would be angels and dinner would make itself. But in reality, kids are dirty and there never seems to be enough time or energy for all the cleaning we need to do!

In the grand scheme of things, most of us have much bigger priorities than spending all day cleaning up a house that will just be dirty again in hours. I really struggled with this for YEARS, especially as a homeschooler since my kids are home making messes all day long! (Bless them)

But I’ve finally developed a daily cleaning schedule that keeps my cleaning time to a bare minimum, with maximum payoff!

Choose your top 3 daily priorities

I know we all want the whole house to be sparkling, but I’ve found that by identifying what stresses me out the most, I can make better use of my time and effort.

For example, my priorities are:
1. clean floor
2. wiped off counter
3. no laundry pile-up

Even though I hate gross bathrooms and dishes in the sink, I’ve learned that I can still sleep and function if those top 3 are taken care of!

If it’s hard for you to decide or you get overwhelmed by all the mess, just think “If I only had 5 minutes to clean something, what would it be?” Mine is ALWAYS picking up &/or sweeping the floor! But yours might be toilet scrubbing or dishes. It’s totally up to you!

My two favorite floor cleaning tools are this Dyson cordless vacuum for the kids to use and for spot cleaning messes and this robot vacuum to do the whole house while I blog or catch up on TV in the evenings! I LOVE it!! 

And these reusable wipes are my favorites for the kitchen counters and cabinets. We use one for about a week until it gets too nasty then we just throw it away!

Every mom deals with dirt but this daily cleaning schedule, along with some great cleaning products, will have your home looking great in no time!

Choose 1 or 2 daily cleaning times

When kids are home all day every day, I really have to decide WHEN I want my house to be clean, because it doesn’t stay that way for long! I’ve decided that I really need to wake up to a clean house and for it to look somewhat decent when Luke comes home from work.

That means that our pick-up and chore times tend to be around the late afternoon (4 or 5pm) and right before bed. It can help kids to make this time fun by motivating them with a clean-up dance party (we throw on some favorite pop songs on our Amazon Echo or “Alexa” and tell them we clean until 2 songs are over) or by telling them they’ll get dessert or a bedtime story when the playroom is clean.

This really helps align both mine and the kids’ expectations and they start to anticipate having a clean house at the same time as me! 

Every mom deals with dirt but this daily cleaning schedule, along with some great cleaning products, will have your home looking great in no time!

Let things go

There are some phases of life when you will have no cobwebs or fingerprints on windows and every last sock will be matched and properly put away. But if you have a bunch of little kids at home (or you have a job, or you home school, or you’re sick or pregnant, etc) then this is probably not that phase.

I seem to be preaching this mantra a lot lately (like in this guide to having a stress-free holiday) but it brings me so much peace! When a certain household chore starts driving me crazy, I have to reevaluate and see if it’s really necessary to do ALL that I’m doing in that area.

For example, I used to wash, dry, fold and put away the laundry for every single one of the 10 people in our household (I’m high strung like that). I finally realized that even though I loved the feeling of having everyone’s laundry done the “right way”, my sanity and schedule just couldn’t afford that luxury anymore.

Now I make the 3 big kids (ages 9 to 13) do their own laundry, and everyone down to age 5 folds and puts theirs away. When clothes come out of the dryer, I just quickly sort them into divided baskets like these for each room (one section of basket per kid) and then they collect them and put it all away. 
Is it perfect? Not a chance. Do I care? I’m learning not to!

Be sure to also check out this post for my favorite deep cleaning trick when life is crazy, and this video for a look at our kids’ chore chart!

Do you have a daily cleaning schedule that helps you tackle the chaos of kids?

Photos by Photography Hill. 

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1 Comment

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    How to be at peace with a messy house • Bonnie and Blithe
    December 14, 2020 at 7:59 pm

    […] mentioned this concept before (in this post) but it is truly life changing! When we realize we’ll never get to all the cleaning there is […]

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