The Experiment

I'm a terrible house wife. I'm not that great of a cook and I hate cleaning. It's not that it disgusts me or I'm averse to manual labour - I just don't like doing it. It always seems like something else is more important so I delay, delay, delay until we are struggling under mountains of clutter and windows with fingerprints all over them.

I finally convinced Jeff that we need to hire help, just someone to come in every other week for a couple hours to do the things I hate the most - cleaning the bathroom and kitchen (and I really don't like I'm alone in this). I did some research into cleaning agencies and individuals and was *shocked* at how much they were going to charge to clean our teeny tiny home for a couple hours. Much to my disappointment this was going to turn into another DIY project.

Using Clean Mama Printables as a guide I made a really easy to accomplish 'Weekly Cleaning Checklist'. I could have chosen to purchase any of her awesome documents, but I'm a DIYer at heart and couldn't resist trying my hand at it in Excel.

Each day focuses on a different room (kitchen, bathrooms, bedrooms, front room and den) and tasks include washing the floors, dusting, cleaning the litterbox and doing the laundry. These are all tasks that when crammed into 1 day seems like too much, but if you stretch them over a week it's not that bad.

And because I didn't want to go through any extra paper than normal I took the document to Staples and got them to laminate it for $1.50. Using a dry erase we check off each task at the end of the day and wipe it all clean at the end of the week. It's perfect!

We've been using our Checklist for a couple weeks now and I have to say, it is quite pleasant to come home to a clean home every day and not have to worry about doing it all on the weekend, but I still hate cleaning. I don't think any fun checklists will ever cure me of that!
Anyone have some fun tips to make cleaning less of a chore?? I'm very open to suggestions!