Daily House Cleaning Schedule For Homes With Children

A house cleaning schedule will keep your home basically clean and tidy at all times.

That is much better, in my opinion, that just cleaning your house when it is filthy, because you get to enjoy it being cleaner a much larger percentage of the time that way.

Photo © Istockphoto.com/NottinghamPhotographer

Cleaning your house incrementally, on a daily basis, will also keep you from burning out on cleaning, because you will have a beginning and ending point daily.

Life Moves In Rhythms And Cycles And So Should Your Housekeeping

Every morning we get up, put on clean clothes, eat breakfast, dirty breakfast dishes, etc. You know the drill.

However, one morning we wake up to put on our clean clothes, or eat our bowl of oatmeal, and there are no clean clothes or dishes. Our cycle has been disrupted.

How can we avoid disrupting this cycle?

Simply by making sure that our house cleaning schedule reflects and complements our daily routines and habits.

Actions such as cleaning dishes in the sink, or washing laundry, if done as consistently as we use them, will keep the cycle going.

That is why it is best to have certain household chores that we do daily, while others are weekly, monthly, seasonally, or yearly.

In fact, if you use both a daily house cleaning schedule and a weekly housecleaning schedule, combined, you will see vast improvement in the state of your home.

The reason for this is that a large majority of our lives rhythms and cycles flow on a daily or weekly basis.

A Daily House Cleaning Schedule Is Not As Onerous As It Sounds

When I talk about daily household chores I am not talking about cleaning your house for hours on end each day.

In fact, using a house cleaning schedule you will not need to clean that long at all.

I take 20-30 minutes in the morning and 30-45 minutes in the evening for this schedule, but this is the total time for my weekly laundry schedule, weekly house cleaning, and my daily chores including daily kitchen cleanup after every meal at home, combined, not just the daily chores by themselves.

Of course, part of the reason it takes me this long daily is that I have three kids, all of whom are pretty young.

Each child you have increases the amount of time you need to clean, especially when they are still young.

As your children get older they get less messy (at least spills and crumbs kind of messy), and they are able to help more with chores.

Therefore, even though when you have several small kids it may take longer to deal with your housekeeping daily, as long as you train your children to help with chores the amount of time should again shorten as they get older.

The amount of time I consider it takes to do your house cleaning schedule is one area where Flylady and I disagree, because one of her slogans is "fifteen minutes a day."

In this season of your life, with several young children, I do not think that is realistic.

Now, doing it fifteen minutes at a time (or five minutes if you have a little baby), that may be more realistic. However, that is not exactly her slogan, is it?

Essential Daily Household Chores All Boil Down To One Thing - Putting Things Back To Their Rightful State

The theme for all daily household chores is that they all are about putting things away, or returning them to their original state so they can be used again in the next turn of the cycle.

When I think of it like that it really doesn't seem that hard.

The following list of daily household chores is only a guide, but generally I think these are pretty universal because each of us eat daily and also wears clothes. OK, maybe some of us don't wear clothes ;)

You can also click here to share your daily household chores, and what you find essential to do everyday to make things run smoothly in your home.

Daily House Cleaning Schedule

Put away dirty clothes in laundry baskets
Wipe down bathroom sinks and tubs after each use (I am not talking about scrubbing here, just making sure toothpaste is not drying in a big glob, etc.)
Prepare meals
Clean up kitchen after meals, including both dishes, pots and pans, and a quick wipe of the counter and sweep of major crumbs on the floor
Sort the mail
Put things back in their proper place (also known as neatening or tidying)
Empty trash bags in high traffic areas, such as the kitchen
Make beds (this is optional, but it is always a nice treat to slip into a freshly made bed in the evening)

Try a daily house cleaning schedule and see how it goes. If you create one that works well for you (or you already have one), please post it for everyone to see below, so we can all benefit from your ideas!

Wish this daily cleaning schedule was printable?

Well, it is!

Click here to get this as a printable daily household chores checklist (opens as a PDF) so you don't even have to write out your own.

Then, you can put it directly in your household notebook!

What Are Your Must Do Daily Household Chores?

Every family is different, but we can learn from other's examples. Share your must-do daily household chores with us, and explain why it works for you and your family.

Helpful information will include the size of your family, including the age range of your children (you don't have to be too specific), who does what cleaning, and whether you work outside of the home or not, among other things.

Enter the title of your must-do daily household chores (for example, "Taylor's Top Tip - Putting Things Away Twice A Day")

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Read About Other Visitors Daily Household Chores

Click on the links below to see some great lists of daily household chores from other visitors. They were written by other visitors to this page.

Hopefully you can get some great ideas for your own list of daily household chores!

Daily Household Cleaning Schedules From Around The Web Lots of people have daily household cleaning schedules which they use to great effect.

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Wipe ...

Jacqui's 15 minute whirl Taylor's introduction: I have asked what is your daily must do chores, or cleaning schedule ? Here is Jacqui's response: Jacqui's daily cleaning routine:...

Daily Chores Of Reader Below a reader of Household Management 101 shares what she does everyday for her chores around her home. She says:

Everyday my daily chores include ...