I’ve realized today that I need a better cleaning schedule. Flylady has zones, which are great, but I also need to make a schedule for my own house of the things that need to be cleaned on certain days.

Like today. Today is Wednesday, when our Bible study group meets at our house. Which means the downstairs needs to be vacuumed and presentable for the people coming over. And trust me, it doesn’t look as good on Thursday evening as it does Wednesday evening.

But in order to get the downstairs clean, I have to do a list of chores that sometimes seems a mile long. This can get really frustrating, but I realize that if I kept certain things a little nicer in the first place then I wouldn’t have to do a mass clean every week.

Anyway, I’m getting off point. Flylady has zones that you do each week. One zone per week, and you clean that entire zone over the course of the week. But what do you do when you have a regular meeting that requires 3 of those zones to be clean every week? You can do major cleaning, like moving the furniture and sweeping cobwebs, once a month, but you have to keep those rooms in order daily or weekly in the meantime.

I have a list of chores to do each week that goes like this:

Scrub kitchen table and chairs, vacuum front room and living room, clean kitchen counters, clean up toy room (which takes up to an hour sometimes), then get all the hotspots in all of these rooms picked up, which often includes taking laundry upstairs, removing toys, and going through the mail that gets tossed wherever. This is not an exhaustive list, but in general, it takes the place of my weekly cleaning, because it takes about 2 hours total to get it all done, and the stuff Flylady calls her “home blessing hour” are things that I feel do not need to be done every week anyway.

But here’s the biggest problem: I can only do so much of this before Wednesday, and I can’t leave any of it until Thursday. Which really just means that Wednesday is the day I have to spend cleaning, because nothing stays clean long enough to do it beforehand. It’s not a full-on pile of garbage come Tuesday evening, but it makes me wonder how things do pile up so quickly, even if it’s not as bad as “Hoarders”.

Well, I’m almost finished, anyway, I just need to get a few things picked up before starting the dishes, so I better get back to work!