Cleaning Routines for 2024

It's that time of year when we reflect on the year and set new goals. I love this stuff too much. List making and journaling and bliss. Aaaah

One thing I am proud of for 2023 is I really buckled down and figured out how to keep a clean house without it taking up 90% of my brain. Not that having a clean house is the only thing that should matter, but it is hard to relax and to take time for yourself when you have to move around piles of clutter.

And I knew it could be done because I had interrogated lots of neat people and the way they talked you could tell they didn't see cleaning as a mountainous task. It's kind of like asking a healthy person how they eat they just be like I just eat. Because that's how they see it. Not in macros and calories and all that so I knew there was a way. I just wasn't going to find it by asking clean people.

Clean person: Hmm I don't really clean that much

There were a few different things that helped me, but here are the main resources I dug into:

1.Fly Lady

2. Clean Mama

3. Dana K White ( A slob comes clean )

Routines are so powerful because when you've done them enough, it doesn't feel hard, and you just go on autopilot. You don't need to motivate yourself or make a plan or waste any time its just a to b, b to c, then its all done.

Without the anguish, the drama, the list making.

So here are the cleaning routines I tried and my honest reviews of them.

FLY LADY's cleaning routine:

Fly lady has been around for a long time. You can tell by her website, it looks like something that was designed in the early 2000's. Its quite confusing to look through, I ended up just finding youtube videos that were more streamlined. She also has a book, but sometimes I get impatient and just want something that tells you what to do.

Flylady gives you 8 daily tasks to do:

1. Get dressed to shoes

2. Make bed

3. Swish and swipe (brush your teeth while you tidy bathroom)

4. Shine your sink - do the dishes

5. 1 load laundry

6. 5-15 min sone cleaning

7. Dry and put away laundry

8. 5-15 min daily focus

Then every day you have a different daily focus:

MON- weekly home blessing ( 1 hour of cleaning )

TUES- free day and water plants

WED - Meal plan, clean out fridge, make appointments

THURS- Grocery shop, library, errands etc

FRI- Clean car and purse

SAT & SUN - off

But that's not all. There's one more layer to this routine. Every week you have a specific zone of your house you allocate 15 minutes a day to deep cleaning. Fly lady splits up the house into 5 zones. So every 5 weeks you have deep cleaned your house.

Zone 1 - Entrance, Dining, Front porch

Zone 2 - Kitchen

Zone 3 - Bathroom, Bedrooms, office, laundry

Zone 4 - Master Bedroom and closet

Zone 5 - Living room

THINGS I LOVED ABOUT FLY LADY:

I love her philosophy that as a mom, you are also a home manager. She suggest putting together a binder and treating your role as a real job. That is why in her daily tasks she has you get dressed and put on shoes right in the morning. Treating your duties as a job is a more meaningful way to look at everything.

Me promoting myself to Home Manager

I put together a Home Management Binder and in there I put any bills, recipes, insurance things, anything that need to be dealt with. This binder also has all the zone cleaning checklists, as well as a tab for recipes, finances, birthdays/ addresses - all the things that you need but just not all the time. It does feel good to have it in one place instead of things just getting thrown in the junk drawer.

There's plenty of youtube videos on this, I found this one to be helpful. I also used her printable cleaning lists. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oO6V_gZ4lIE

Monday Cleaning- I used to do grocery shopping on Mondays plus try to recover the house from the weekend. It was just too much for one day. With Mondays focus all about the weekly home blessing I felt less overwhelmed. I felt like I reset the house for the week and it was easier to do the rest of the cleaning.

Wednesday Meal planning and Thursday Grocery shopping- moving these toward the end of the week helps spread out the work more evenly. No more meal planning Sunday night, I could just relax, knowing I was scheduled to do it later.

Friday Clean out Van- loved this, it kept the van from becoming a mold zone, and is manageable if you keep up on it.

Timers- I love the concept of setting 10-15 minutes and getting as much as you can done. It eliminates the anguish of there is too much to do.

NOT AS LOVEABLE PARTS OF FLYLADY:

Micromanaging. I know its silly, but some mornings I didn't feel like getting dressed right away. Then I couldn't check that off the morning checklist, and then I had less motivation to do the rest of it. I felt like I'm not really sticking to the plan right off the bat, so what's the point?

Zone cleaning - especially on Mondays after slaving away for an hour, it felt like a lot to dedicate another 15 minutes to deep cleaning. I felt like I could stick to the routine for the most part but I never got around to the zone cleaning.

Uneven Workload

What I mean by this is Monday you are cleaning cleaning cleaning then other days you don't have to do nearly as much. Some people might prefer this but I would rather have the cleaning split up more evenly

Eventually after trying many times to stick to the full routine, I was tired of feeling like I couldn't measure up. I found another cleaning routine on youtube and decided to try it.

CLEAN MAMA

Clean Mama cleaning routine is simpler. You have 5 daily tasks:

1. Make Bed

2. Check floors - vacuum sweep if needed / get clutter off the floor

3. Wipe Counters- clear away clutter and wipe down after meals . This includes checking bathroom counters daily

4. Clutter - pick up clutter during step 2 and 3, declutter as needed

5. Laundry- one load of laundry washed and put away daily

Clean Mama also has a daily focus, these are supposed to be completed in 15 minutes or less.

MON- Bathrooms

TUES- Dusting

WED- Vacuum

THURS- Wash floors

FRI- catch all

SAT- sheets and towels

Its all combined into a checklist like this- you can find all this on her website.

As far as deep cleaning- clean mama just has you pick one zone a month. So January deep cleaning could be kitchen, or bedrooms, or whatever you choose. You get to choose when to do this and in what order.

WHAT I LOVED ABOUT CLEAN MAMA-

1. Simple. I was able to keep my entire house clean with these 5 daily tasks. With Fly lady, I would do the tasks but our bedroom and Avery's room would still have a layer of clothes and clutter on the floor that I never got around to. With this one, you start getting all the floors picked up, then counters, and then its like wha-bam the house looks clean! Miraculous.

2. Splitting up the workload. When you mop the floors, you also mop the bathroom floors that day too. And on the bathroom days you don't have to. Its easier to do everything at once then one at a time.

3. Easier to complete. A lower bar then fly lady, and its nice to feel like you are doing something right. With Flylady I did not feel as accomplished because I did not usually get around to the 15 min zone cleaning and the house was more cluttered.

4. Easier Mondays- Just focusing on Bathrooms rather than the whole house was better for me.

NOT AS LOVEABLE-

1. No Saturdays off- you do have to wash sheets and towels. Which I still prefer rather than doing them Mondays like Fly lady

2. No scheduled time for deep cleaning. So I haven't really tackled this part of it yet. I told myself I was going to get the basics down first, THEN I would add in the deep cleaning, and we haven't done it yet. So the freedom is good, but it is also harder to stick to. Maybe in 2024 we'll successfully add it in.

DANA K WHITE - A Slob Comes Clean

This lady is funny. and relatable. She has a book called How To Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind

I listened to the audio version. Her main message is

1. Start with dishes

2. De-clutter

So if you ever wonder where to start- she says dishes dishes dishes get your sink clean.

She also has a lot of decluttering strategies.

While I found her to be a loveable funny person, I did not gain much value from her philosophies. I think this is because clutter is not my main problem, I can throw things out with very little angst. Probably because of my 2017 obsession with Marie Kondo.

Lucia parting with all of her wordly possessions' in during the Reign of Kondo

In the end, I came up with a hybrid of the Clean Mama and Fly Lady plans. Fridays I clean the van instead of using it as a catch all day. On the dusting days, I also clean my mirrors and spot clean windows which comes from Fly Lady.

One thing that wasn't part of either plan but really really helped me was focus cleaning.

Focus cleaning is exactly what it sounds like: you, silence, and just focusing on getting as much done in 15 minutes. With no podcast or Marco Polo in your headphones. It's amazing how much more I get done. Mindless things like folding laundry or dusting I might have a podcast or book to listen to, but I've realized when you are trying to put away clutter and you have something yammering in your ear, it slows you down a lot.

So where am I at the end of 2023. I do not have my deep cleaning down, but I feel SO much more in control of the house. I do not feel overwhelmed, even when it is messy I know I am just 15 minutes away from order and peace. Or at least a step in that direction.

I am glad I tried out both routines, I took something away from each of them. Mostly I am just proud that at least once a day, the house is all tidy. A year ago I was just not sure how a person would pull that off.

My plan for 2024 is to continue with the clean mama routine, and to add in the deep cleaning part of the routine.

That's all for now, best of luck on your 2024 resolutions! I am going to wait till I am a few months in to my new years resolution to share with you. Or not, if it turns out to be a complete flop.

Happy New Year!

Potato Farmers Wife