We all want a clean house right!? As clean as we can master in the limited time we have with kids, work and play. This way of cleaning has changed the look and feel of our house and most of all it has lightened the heavy to do list that is never ending in my mind. This Zone Cleaning 101 goes deeper than the surface, I hope it helps you out as much as it does me!
A short intro ….
I do my weekly Saturday cleaning which usually takes between 2 to 3 hours, but that’s for the regular stuff. Vacuuming and dusting the whole house, washing the floors, cleaning the shower, quick swipe of the fridge, you know.
Then there is my daily thing which is necessary to keep things from looking like a bomb exploded. This would be doing the laundry, washing the dishes, wiping down the sink and toilets, vacuuming if needed.
Still, after all this cleaning no doors, drawers, closets, windows, radiators, cabinets have been touched by a cleaning cloth. It just seems overwhelming and undo-able. That’s where this zone cleaning comes in.
I divide my house into 7 zones, this could be 5, 6 or 8, depending on the size of your home or amount of rooms. This zone cleaning is an addition of 15 to 20 minutes to my daily cleaning, 5 days per week. Very doable and everything in the house that otherwise would be skipped or done once as part of a Spring cleaning gets thoroughly cleaned once every 7 weeks. And Sundays we chill …
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My zones are,
- Kitchen
- Living Room
- Hallway / Stairs / Master Bedroom
- Kids Rooms
- Bathroom
- Garden / Laundry / Play Room
- Garage / Outside of Home
My first zone is the kitchen, I do my every day stuff like washing the dishes, emptying the garbage, swiping the floor, quick wipe of the cabinets and then I add during one week every day an extra task for some zone deep cleaning. This way it all feels more doable, small bite size chunks.
The 5 days of 15 to 20 minutes in the kitchen could look like this,
- deep clean fridge, freezer
- cleaning the oven
- tiles, windows, windowsill, door
- inside of cabinets and drawers
- cleaning dishwasher, washing trash can
We can fill in the needs of our zones for ourselves, you know your house and its needs the best. There are zones that require more work than others so I often take one extra day for my kitchen in another zone with less to do.
For example for the Hallway / Stairs,
- de-clutter shoes, scarfs, gloves etc
- de-clutter and clean closets / drawers in hallway
- wash borders hallway, stairs and on all floors of the house
- clean windows, handrails, doors
- wash curtains and clean lighting features
You need to make your own to do list depending on your needs. Imagine this deep cleaning once in 7 weeks! And for every room in the house. If you keep up with it it will eliminate those need to clean spots we all want to hide or make disappear. For sure this doesn’t happen everyday or every week. In December I slacked a bit with kids home, Holidays … and that’s for sure now visible. But I do know that this works and that once I get back in the groove I so love the results.
When starting out with this I would advice to write down your zones and what you plan to do on each day. I have made these charts below on which you can click, download as a pdf and print out. ( free ) Or click HERE for the same pdf.
This really works for me and hope it also helps you out. If you have any clean-house hacks let me know!
Tina x
