Rotating Cleaning Schedule You Can Use for Your Home

 

If you live with a lot of people in your home, you know that people often enjoy keeping to their routines. Unfortunately, the chores still need to get done regularly. If you change up your chore routines, you still need to make sure everything is being taken care of. The best way for this is to create a rotating cleaning schedule that you can use for your home.

Understand SMART Goals

SMART goals are a mnemonic for how to set effective goals that keep your family moving toward its combined objectives. SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant (or realistic), and time-bound (or timely). With SMART objectives, your family can measure its achievement and adjust if it either looks like you’ve overestimated or underestimated your capabilities.

Understand Your People

A rotating cleaning schedule makes sense for your family if you understand everyone in the family. If you have children with sensory sensitivities to greasy textures, it might be a good idea to limit their time handling dishes. If you have adults with the same sensitivities, that might not be avoidable, but you can have a talk with them about accommodations for their sensitivities. For example, purchasing a pair of rubber gloves to keep their hands out of the goo.

If your kids love to play in the mud, but complain about greasy textures when they’re doing dishes, make sure you talk with them. Maybe there’s a way that you can get them to enjoy helping out with the dishes.

Sensitivities to cleaning products need to be considered as well. If someone has an allergy to scents and perfumes, make sure that you’re using scent-free cleaning products. Keep the air as clear as possible. This will make everyone more comfortable. It will also make sure the cleaning gets done and nobody goes to the emergency room.

Make Sure the Schedule Makes Sense

One of the banes of a rotating cleaning schedule is that sometimes the progression of tasks can make little or no sense to the people doing them. If your cleaning schedule’s tasks aren’t playing to your family member’s strengths and talents, make sure that you’re adjusting them to do so. Your family cleaning schedule will work much better for everybody involved when they have a solid progression of what they need to do.

Your rotating cleaning schedule will work well if, for example, your child is helping with preparing dinner on Monday and then doing the dishes for it on Tuesday, linking creation with cleaning up. But if the same child is preparing dinner on Monday and doing yard work on Tuesday, there may be some consternation as to how the cleaning schedule is being laid out for your kids.

Cleaning the Shades, Blinds, and Shutters

When your window shades are in use, they will get dusty and dirty regularly. They need to be cleaned every few days to keep dirt and dust from building up, and this is a quick task to assign. If your kids are tall enough or have access to a stepladder or stepstool to get up to the highest areas of the shades or blinds, they should be fine with this on the rotating cleaning schedule. Kids younger than If it is children doing this, they probably shouldn’t be unattended and unassisted. This is because it involves high places, and shutters might involve getting up on a ladder outside your house. You want to keep small children from falling. Older kids, especially teenagers, might be especially engaged with a task that requires some small amount of athleticism in its performance.

Dusting the Vents and Checking the Air

A small but necessary task on your rotating cleaning schedule is to make sure that all the heating and cooling vents are unblocked and clean. With most events in a modern house on or near the floor, this is an excellent task for anyone to undertake. Teach your kids to use a duster or a rag to do this. Keep in mind that you want to be careful of the ventilation duct cover. Your best opportunity to teach small children about cleaning up as a team is to guide them through this task. When they feel confident in performing it on their own, make sure you’re checking on them every few minutes to make sure they’re not in danger.

When it Gets to be Too Much

Even with a rotating cleaning schedule, there’s the possibility that you might not be able to keep up for a short time or even a longer time. If your home is starting to look messy due to having problems with cleaning or mobility, it might be time to investigate hiring a local house cleaning service. There’s no shame in this.

Everyone has times when they fall behind on cleaning and need help to catch up. If you’re seeing some of yourself in this picture, it might be a good time to give your honesty and your SMART goals a check and call a cleaning service to get you back even with the mess before you return to your usual cleaning schedule. A professional company should be able to handle these tasks efficiently. However, this will likely be a more expensive option.

Sweep the Garage Floor

When you have a garage floor epoxy coating, you can stop looking at oil stains on the floor as an inevitable product of parking at your home and start seeing them as something you can take care of. Epoxy resin doesn’t hold grease the way concrete does, and it can be cleaned and dried with a degreaser, keeping the floor of your garage looking pristine. This is another task that the rotating cleaning schedule can help with, making sure that everybody has a chance to help in the garage.

Once the garage floor is swept and cleaned, making sure that all the oil stains are cleaned with a degreaser, the garage can become another part of the house for recreation and relaxation. Even if you don’t plan on using the garage for recreation, it’s still a great idea to keep the space clean. The garage also is an ideal place to do bike maintenance and other basic tasks on your recreational equipment, so make sure that you know what things you’re bringing into and out of your home through the garage.

Check on Your Dumpster Service

Most homes are served with a wheeled garbage can provided by the urban waste disposal provider of the homeowner’s choice. But this dumpster service isn’t always the best available for you. If you have major projects that are happening in your home, it’s best to call out for a specialty dumpster service.

Older family members, especially the adults in the house, might need to patrol the dumpster periodically and make sure that materials that aren’t dumpster-compatible like paints and combustibles haven’t been thrown in the dumpster. This is not a rotating cleaning schedule task for small children and may not even be suitable for adolescents unless the teenagers have a strong sense of responsibility. Make sure that whoever is handling the dumpster service is able to distinguish between what belongs in the trash and what should be recycled. Overall, having the correct dumpster service for your needs will help get rid of your waste faster.

Maintaining Your Floors

Hardwood flooring is a beautiful way to show off your home. With clean, dry hardwood, your home looks exemplary. Unfortunately, dirty hardwood flooring can make a house look worse. The best way to make sure your hardwood flooring remains immaculate is to keep it tidy with regular cleaning. Hardwood flooring is a good rotating cleaning schedule item for teenagers to adults because it requires a bit of arm strength to manipulate both a mop and bucket.

It’s not too taxing, however, make sure this task is designated to someone who can see it to completion. Vacuuming the floor first is often the correct first step. That way you can get rid of all the crumbs and other loose junk that may be present. Once you vacuum. you can then think about washing the floors.

When You Have a Countertop Mess

Your granite countertop is a beautiful way to make your kitchen look modern, and it’s one of the most popular home renovations right now. The pretty patterns of a granite countertop can make every meal feel like a dinner party. Because granite is porous, however, it needs to be sealed or otherwise protected against invasion of liquids and debris, and spills should be mopped up or swept up as quickly and expediently as possible. Making sure that your granite countertop is clean and dry can be done by the whole family as part of your rotating cleaning schedule.

Mold in the Home

One thing that probably shouldn’t go on your rotating cleaning schedule is mold remediation. While making sure that everything is clean and dry will inhibit mold from ever showing up in the first place, the fact is that your kids can have severe reactions to mold exposure. Leave the mold remediation to the professionals. They are much more likely to have the right tools to deal with it productively than you will.

Keeping your home clean and dry and mold-free is a great chance for everyone to pitch in on the housework. Keeping your kids busy and out of the way while you handle obvious mold and call in the professionals for the more difficult-to-find and out-of-the-way stuff is your responsibility, too. Safety first in dealing with mold!

Important Safety Items to Keep on Hand

The common safety products you’ll need to use for cleaning should always be on hand in your home. If you don’t have safety products available, you’ll be at a higher risk of having a reaction while you are cleaning. Single-use protective gloves are important because once you’re done cleaning your home, you can discard the gloves and leave all contaminants in the garbage can.

Likewise, make sure you have respiratory protection, in the form of a protective mask of at least N95 grade. Eye protection is crucial as well because not only are many cleansers caustic, but so are their vapors and fumes. Making sure they stay out of your eyes and your kids’ eyes is important. If your kids are working with alkaline cleansers, make sure you always supervise them if they’re young. Make sure you wash your hands, and they wash theirs when they finish cleaning up. Safety is a crucial factor in keeping your kids engaged in cleaning tasks.

Getting All This Out of the House

Taking out the trash is one of the most disliked chores. Kids of all ages have hated waste removal for as long as there’s been waste to remove. The trash combines lots of things that kids hate. It generally smells bad; the bags often tear and leak. If your children have sensory sensitivities, there is almost certainly something in the garbage that will trigger those sensitivities as well. It’s easy to see why taking out the garbage is a difficult task for children. To make it easier, make sure you’re assigning garbage removal regularly, when the can isn’t full, and the bag can be tied off more easily. This will make the bag easier for children to handle, weighing less and being less full. It will also make sure that the bag is less likely to tear on the way to the garbage can.

Making a rotating cleaning schedule can be a challenge. Balancing sensory difficulties, the abilities of children of varying ages, and the safety of different tasks in the household can be daunting. But the benefits are immense. When the same person isn’t stuck with the same task day after day, work is easier to do. When the family all helps with the chores, they get done faster. And when everyone is done sooner, the family can fully enjoy the benefits of a clean and tidy home.