Ah, housekeeping! This is the practical side of homemaking. So often, I write about the beauty of creating a welcoming home and the noble role of homemakers, but this is the less glamorous part of the story. However homely, housekeeping is still a very important part of homemaking!
I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a long time, but kept telling myself I don’t have enough experience. Shouldn’t you be hearing this from a homemaker who’s tried every different system and knows for sure which one is best? Or someone with 20 years of experience?
I’ve only been at this homemaking game for 4 years, and my housekeeping was pretty haphazard before that. However, I have tried several different approaches to housekeeping, and I want to share with you the one that finally worked for me!
First, a note on comparing yourself to others
Homemaking is hard work, but it’s not drudgery. You don’t have to run around from morning till night and never take any time for yourself.
If you don’t have children, your housekeeping will look different than your sister who has three little kids. You might not be as busy as she is; that’s okay!
Don’t compare yourself to someone else in a different situation and think that you’re not a good homemaker because you don’t bake three loaves of bread or two pans of lasagna at once. As long as supper’s on the table and you’re keeping a balance of work, prayer, and leisure, you’ll be all right.
Schedules bring order to your chaos
Following a weekly housekeeping schedule helps to balance my life. Routines are always good for creating structure, and structure is so helpful at home.
(If you’re interested in routines for meal planning, or how to make a meal plan, see these posts!)
If you’re just transitioning into the role of a homemaker, you may feel overwhelmed by everything there is to do. Or you might find your days slipping away somehow, but feel like you’re not accomplishing anything. I know that’s how I felt at first.
If you go from a full-time student or a job outside of the home to being a full-time homemaker, you’re probably used to the structure of your school or workplace.
As a homemaker, you have the privilege of setting up your own structure! This is a great privilege, and a responsibility. Nobody else is telling you how to manage your time, so you have to figure it out on your own. If you’ve never done that, it can be frustrating or even overwhelming.
Take a deep breath. You can do this! It just takes time to experiment and find out what works for you and what doesn’t. Here are the top reasons why I find a weekly schedule so helpful.
1. I don’t like laundry
My main reason for starting a weekly housekeeping schedule in the first place was that I don’t like doing laundry. I’ve heard many people recommend starting a load of laundry first thing every morning.
Now, I’m glad that method works for them, but to me it sounds like: “Let’s make the whole week stressful and frustrating by turning laundry into a never-ending chore that you have to look at every day.”
No, thank you! I want to do all the laundry in one go, and forget about it for the rest of the week! Enter the weekly housekeeping schedule.
It allows me to focus on laundry one day per week, instead of trying to get all the housework done in one or two days–which invariably means I’ll have a pile of laundry waiting around for me to fold it until I finish everything else!
Small side note:
I don’t count washing diapers as part of my regular laundry. For one thing, I usually don’t have time in one day to wash all the laundry plus a load of diapers in our small washing machine! For another, I wash diapers at least twice per week right now (2 kids in diapers at the moment). So I definitely can’t wash diapers once a week and be done with it!
2. Focus… focus!
My weekly housekeeping schedule helps me to focus on one task until it’s finished. I can write a to-do list a mile long, especially on Mondays. But looking at a long list puts me in a state of mild desperation, and makes me feel like I have to get everything done by the end of the day.
If I try to tackle every chore in the same day, I often end up running on to the next without completely finishing the first one! Keep doing that all day, and I end up exhausted with half the work still undone.
That is so discouraging! It almost seems worse than if I hadn’t even tried to do any housework. At least then I wouldn’t be worn out from running around in circles!
When I stick to my schedule, there are no tachycardia-inducing long lists. Each chore takes longer when you only do it once a week, to be sure: if you only bake one day out of the week, you’ll need to make more bread than you would if you bake every other day.
But I find it much easier to stay on task and focus on my one or two housekeeping tasks per day, rather than try to do ten quick little jobs.
3. You don’t need to remember everything anymore
It’s harder to miss tasks when you write them down ahead of time. Before I made a housekeeping schedule, some things didn’t get cleaned until they were dirty enough to make me stop whatever I was doing and go clean them.
I don’t like living in messy spaces, but laziness gets the best of me if I don’t intentionally prevent it from doing so! It’s always easier in the moment to say, “Oh, the bathroom can wait another day. Let’s go take advantage of this sunny afternoon and go for a walk!”
I’m not saying you should never be spontaneous or have fun, but if you do that too often, your house will begin to look unkempt. I would rather go for a walk after my house is cleaned, rather than return to a mess. Most days.
Occasional housekeeping tasks
What about those chores that don’t need to be done every week? Things like cleaning your oven or vacuum cleaner filter are easy to forget because they seem less urgent.
That’s where a housekeeping schedule can really shine. You can set aside one day for rotating through several different chores that are less frequently needed.
That way, you have a plan, it’s written down, and so you don’t have to keep details — such as when you last rotated your mattress — in your head.
Having a plan takes away so much stress of trying to remember everything that needs to be done! I love finding ways to make my life more peaceful, and writing down tasks on a schedule definitely helps!
Objections to a weekly housekeeping schedule
Maybe you don’t want the restrictions of assigning certain chores to each day. Perhaps you like to let your days flow freely, and cook and clean when you’re in the right mood.
I get that. Sometimes I’ll switch my schedule up and clean on Monday instead of Friday because that’s what I feel like tackling.
But for me, living in a constant state of ambiguity is exhausting. I love to be spontaneous and do fun things, but I also appreciate the slow and steady rhythm of life at home.
My husband and I like spontaneous weekend road trips a lot. We can pack food, kids, and camping gear and hit the road in a couple of hours. I learned early on in our marriage that it is not fun to come home after such a trip to a messy house. It’s much better to unload the car and put the kids to bed in a tidy, serene space!
But if I was saving all of my chores for the weekend, I can’t do that. This is where a weekly housekeeping schedule comes in. If I do all of my housework while my husband is at work, then we can relax and enjoy each others’ company when he comes home.
Now, please don’t think I’m a perfect wife who always has the house tidy and supper on the table when her husband walks in the door! I don’t always accomplish what I plan to do, but that is my goal.
It can’t hurt to try something new
I encourage you to try a weekly housekeeping schedule, even if you think it might not be for you. I know that there are lots of different ways to keep house, and this one might not be a great fit for everyone.
If that’s the case, well, you probably learned something about yourself by trying it. The point is to keep trying different things until you find a method that works for your madness!
I would recommend giving yourself at least three weeks to really see if this will work for you, before you quit. The first week you try might be a holiday, or maybe someone gets sick and you get off kilter for a few days. Three weeks should be sufficient to judge whether or not it’s a good fit.
There’s a season for everything
You’ll also probably find that what works well in one season of your life needs some adjustment when you begin a new season.
I first tried a weekly housekeeping schedule after my first child was born and I desperately needed structure in my life! My sleep-deprived brain couldn’t remember what it was supposed to be doing unless it had a visual reminder.
So I made a simple schedule and posted it on the inside of a cupboard door in my kitchen. Fast forward three years and another baby, and my schedule is definitely different.
There will be more changes as children grow, families move into new homes, parents take different jobs, etc. Life is constantly changing: sometimes in big ways, but always in little ones that are barely noticeable.
Having a schedule for housekeeping allows me to think about it less, and focus more on my family. That is the purpose of housekeeping and homemaking after all, isn’t it? To provide a clean, tidy, cheerful home for one’s family?
I would rather spend more time enjoying my family in such clean, tidy home than running around trying to clean and tidy it! Having a schedule keeps me on track so that I never get too far behind and the house starts slipping into too much disarray.
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I hope this inspires you to try out a weekly housekeeping schedule and see if it works for you. I’ll be sharing how to set up your own schedule soon, so check back in a few days!
Happy homemaking!
~Kimberly
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