This post is for Betsy. She asked how we do the housecleaning and chores around our house.
Before kids and while working away from the house, I was a "do it all in a day" housekeeper. But now that I have four children that need training and make most of the mess, I've changed to the "do a little every day" method. So here is what we do. I have morning after breakfast chores and afternoon chores for Monday thru Friday.
Monday
After breakfast: S to sort S and N's laundry and put it in washer
A to clean out van (empty trash, retrieve light sabers, papers, etc)
D to straighten up magazines
Afternoon: S to sort laundry and put his half away. N to put his half of laundry away.
A to sort clean laundry (his and D's) and put his away. D to put her half away.
Tuesday
After breakfast: All children clean bedrooms (go under beds to get books, get rid of papers floating around, decrease the number of animals in bed to 3 and books to 5)
Afternoon: S, A, and D, clean bathrooms, I do the insides of the toilets, N sweeps the wood floor downstairs
Wednesday
After breakfast: N and S to trade off cleaning the kitchen appliances and dusting upstairs
A to empty and refill water bottles
D to pick up wood scraps (in winter when we have wood fires)
Afternoon: all to help me put away groceries and whatever else I brought in from our errand time.
Thursday
After breakfast: N and S trade off doing windows (the big sliding glass doors and my kitchen windows) and dusting downstairs
A to empty trash cans from basement
D to empty upstairs trash cans
Afternoon: N to vacumm the upstairs wood floor, I vacumm the downstairs carpet, S, A, and D do odd jobs for me (like clean the top of the refrig or wipe fingerprints off of walls
Friday
After breakfast: N to sort S and N's laundry and put it in washer
S to sweep front porch and walkway
A to water plants
D to straighten up her room
Afternoon: N to sort laundry and put his half away. S to put his half of laundry away.
D to sort clean laundry (hers and A's) and put hers away. A to put his half away.
In the summertime, we have lots of outside jobs to do on Saturdays. And of course, everyday someone has to take care of the cat and the chickens.
So there it is, my master plan. Actually I'm going to change it some this summer as Aaron and Deborah are getting much better at their tasks and can take on more work.
4 comments:
Thanks for the posting, Karen. I am theoretically a do-a-little-every-day cleaner, too, except I find that my days get full with running around and whatnot, and I end up doing my share over two or three days towards the end of the week. I should probably stay home more...
I say "my share" because my children are a lot more faithful about keeping up with their scheduled chores each day than I am.
I was trying to remember...do you have a ranch style, or an upstairs/downstairs? And do any of the children share rooms?
Betsy
how come it doesn't look like that much work?
how do your dishes get done?
how long do your morning set and afternoon set take?
We have a ranch style home, but with a fully finished basement so it is like a two story house.
The boys all share a room and lucky Deborah gets one to herself. Good thing since she is into making up games that have lots of pieces scattered around.
Dishes: I also divide up the clearing, sweeping, food prep, and setting the table so that everyone does something for each meal. So all the dishes get into the dishwasher after each meal and then I wash up the ones that either don't fit in the dishwasher or have to be washed by hand.
Both our morning and afternoon set usually take between 5 and 20 minutes. The vacumming takes more like 45 minutes but everything else is probably 20 minutes or less. Even with three boys in a room talking about Star Wars, they can get their beds and room clean in 20 minutes.
It doesn't take too long because they have learned to work quickly and for the most part they do a good job cleaning whatever they are supposed to clean. We used a combination of inspection (with fines or making them do the job over) and instruction (what does it mean to do a job?).
The thing that really helped us was the summer that we taught them how to weed. It wasn't really the weeding but it was the concept of doing a job and doing it right the first time. It took a summer of watching, rewarding, and assigning extra work if they spaced out and talked instead of working while they talked or goofed off by throwing weeds at their brothers. We noticed that after that summer all the children improved in their ability to get work done without arguing (most of the time!) and with less spacing out.
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