Clean With Me: join me as I clean the house!
I haven’t always had a weekly cleaning routine. In fact, for many years I didn’t understand why anyone WOULD.
But I gave it a try, and now there is no going back.
Does it have to happen on the weekends? No. But Saturday morning has been the easiest for all of our family to participate and I want my children to clean with me, so they grow up with the habit of resetting the house once a week.
On a daily basis, I have a morning and evening cleaning routine, but then on Saturdays, we do our major house cleaning.
It’s still not an extensive list, because it has to be something that I am willing to accomplish and manage, and that I can complete within a couple of hours.
Knowing myself, (cleaning is not something that I thoroughly enjoy or live to do) so my cleaning routine has to be something that is small enough I won’t have to work up the motivation or try to convince myself to do it.
If you’d like a list of Saturday cleaning tasks- I have a free PDF – just enter your email and I’ll send it to you:
I leave our print out on the table. It lists all the tasks for the kitchen, living room, dining room, bathroom, the boys’ bedroom, and girls’ bedroom.
The Reward
Saturdays are our video game playing day. The rest of the time during the week, we really limit screen time for the kids, but Saturday is their day to play, as long as they clean their room first.
For me, the reward is a clean house. I love the feeling, and it stays pretty fairly until Monday when everyone is back in school.
Moving from hating cleaning, to enjoying a full-house “reset” has been a huge mental shift for me. The focus is no longer on being annoyed with the task but instead, looking forward to enjoying a clean house for the weekend.
The “clean with me” video
On the morning of the above video, my husband and one son work at 10:00 AM, we don’t have very much time before they get to work, but they’ll do what they can before they have to leave, and the rest of us will take care of the rest of the cleaning.
It’s easier to keep the routine of cleaning the house every Saturday morning, so whoever is available to clean helps clean.
Everybody uses the house, everybody gets it dirty, so we all participate in the cleaning.
In the video, you’ll see a very typical weekend morning, we have not unloaded the dishwasher. (It’s all clean and ready to put away.) We have breakfast dishes to wash and things have been left out from the week and need to be put away so we can clean the counters and dust everything.
The bathroom is probably the worst looking place at the end of the week because so many people use it, it has built-up soap scum and just plain dirty.
Breakfast is still on the table, and there are papers on the piano, shoes, and coats that need to be put away. And the kid’s room is always really bad by Saturday morning- on this particular day, I couldn’t even get the door open. There’s too much on the floor!
You’ll notice as we go through this cleaning that we don’t use cleaning products. A couple of us are very sensitive to smells and chemicals, and I try very hard to limit the toxins in our home, so we use the Norwex Microfiber cloths for most of our cleaning.
We use the largest Norwex mop with the dust mop and wet mop pads. I love it. When I’m done cleaning, I can just throw it into the washing machine.
The microfiber cloth works well for cleaning the stainless steel appliances, and we use the dust mitt to do all the dusting.
If you’re interested in Norwex and you don’t know a Norwex consultant, leave a comment, and I’m happy to hook you up with my consultant. I love her.
When you download the cleaning checklist, or if you’re making your own. Keep things as simple as you need them to be. I don’t include a lot of deep cleaning- no baseboards, fans, light fixtures, etc. And I purposely don’t include them.
I know that if I make my list too long and too overwhelming, I will come up with other things to do instead.
And if you have physical limitations, just be content to do the things you are able to do. There is no perfect way to do things, no perfect order. And if you skip something this week, you can get it done next week.
Doing anything on a weekly basis is much better than doing nothing.
How minimalism changes cleaning
If you’ve watched the video above, you’ve seen what my “messy” house looks like.
But I know, it’s not really messy.
I remember the days when that was my “clean” state after days of work.
That’s what minimalism has done for me. It’s such a relief to have a home that is easy to maintain. That I can actually clean in only a few hours a week. And that my family can clean, because things have homes and they know where they go when they need to be put away.
Having very little on the counters means it’s easy to clean the counters off.
Have very little furniture means it’s easy to sweep or vacuum.
Having less stuff in general means it’s easier to give things places to belong.
And having less means I don’t have to spend as much time managing, moving, sorting, organizing, maintaining or cleaning stuff.
Rember: keep it simple.
If you’re struggling to clean the house every week, then reduce your tasks to a manageable amount and do the extra things like cleaning the baseboards and dusting the fans when you have more time and you feel like doing it.
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About how long does it take your family to clean together (on average)?
About 2-3 hours. If I have to do it on my own it’s about 4 hours, so it really depends on how much help I have. 😊
I desperately need help ! I googled anything, like it can help me! I have to declutter this house on my own and didn’t think any articles can help me. but u have written so much on this, I must sit and read all u wrote! u are right, on the anxiety and depression and the guilt, I just keep crying over this! its not easy, as I am trying to ssort a million things, what goes to garbage and what can go to the missions, and what I can sell. if its in great shape, how can people just throw into garbage, when its worth something! i am having so much trouble, as it is so hard to move around the totes and when u don’t have much space it makes it impossible!!! wondering how to reach this writer! and how to stop feeling this? I feel very overwhelmed I am getting sick, and I need to change my mindset but don’t know how! Jackie
im not certain if my comment got out there, as it doesnt say it posted. if u can let me know, as I need so much help in changing my mindset as I am going crazy! literally getting sick trying to declutter this house and have no idea how to get to it, it just seems to get worse! I am a mess. curious if anyone knows how to reach this author Rachel jones? thank you. Jackie
Hi Jackie, it sounds like you could really use the support of a local counselor. My website has a lot of how-to information, which you can definitely follow! But to work on the mindset shift and helping you through the difficult emotions that will come up, it would be really good if you could have someone to talk to that would help you with the right perspective. I would recommend asking friends for recommendations for counselors in your areas, or search google and read some reviews, then make an appointment with the one that sounds good. ❤️
I just watched your video of your whole family helping with cleaning your home on Saturday morning. I think you are AMAZING! And so is your family! My sons are now 27 and 30 years old and I wish I had had you, your tips and your video to learn from when they were young. Only one of them still lives at home.
Oh Thank you Anne. ❤️
This reminded me of times gone when our 3 boys lived at home and my husband and I worked crazy hours. Every Saturday morning my husband took the boys to football and I planned the next week’s lessons, did marking etc. We then had a nice lunch at home. Then everyone gave an hour to cleaning. We went crazy through the house. My oldest sons hour was equivalent to an adults hour. Our youngest was of course slower but he did an hour too. So that was say 4.5 man hours of cleaning in that one hour and so by 2pm the house looked lovely and we had the rest of the weekend to relax. We did this for years!
Your right everyone needs to clean the house. Those tips were very helpful, thanks for sharing!
Do you normally do room by room videos or whole house cleanings?
I don’t normally do clean-with-me videos. 🙂
I decluttered my 2 bedroom apartment during lockdown. Went through my wardrobe and sorted clothes either for bin, charity shop or to keep. 9 large black bags full of clothes including shoes, handbags and costume jewellery went to the charity shop. They were all good but I never wore them. I enjoy opening my wardrobe now and it’s easier to choose an outfit. Then I tackled household items that were just lying around, on shelves dressing table, set of drawers and in boxes, toys that the grandchildren no longer use, books and ornaments and sent it all to the dump, indiscriminately, great feeling throwing everything out. Got rid of the cot that is no longer used by grandchildren and more furniture, put some on the free website to get rid of it. Bought paint and my son and family and my daughter painted the whole apartment, walls, ceilings, doors and skirting. Moved myself into larger bedroom and got new bed, wardrobe and dresser. I now have a whole new house that’s lovely to wake up in the mornings to, clutter free, loads of space, nice bright colours. Didn’t cost much, mostly time.
[…] And I’ve accepted the fact that I’m going to see random cat hairs on my white floor throughout the week- and it’s ok, I’ll clean them up on Saturday when I do my weekly reset. […]
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