I’ve never liked cleaning. I LOVE having a clean house, but the process of getting there has never been much fun for me. When I worked less it wasn’t too hard to keep on top of the house, but now that I’m working quite long hours on my online businesses it doesn’t leave me with much spare time to get stuff done. When my kids are at school and daycare, that is my work time so I can’t waste it by cleaning.
(Ah if only I looked this good while doing my laundry!)
My ultimate goal is to get a cleaner and someone to help with the gardening (I even put it on my list of 40 things I’m going to do now that I’m 40 list over on my other blog!). It’s going to be my first treat to myself when I can justify the extra outgoing. Unfortunately, right now it’s something I need to commit to doing myself though (as my hubby works long hours, has a long commute and is in the process of an epic DIY project that is taking up all of his non-work time, cleaning and cutting the grass is pretty much solely down to me or it doesn’t get done).
I’ve got into the habit of leaving the cleaning and stacking up the laundry to deal with at the weekend and then blitzing the whole house in one day. Yesterday, I did about sixty billion loads of laundry (washed, dried and put away), I cleaned two bathrooms, cleaned the kitchen and dining room, ran the vacuum around the whole house, steam cleaned all the floors and cleaned all of our glass (doors, coffee tables, TVs etc.). I hated every second of it, and while I did it my kids turned feral and two of them battled like cat and dog the whole time. It was not the calm, fun weekend I had planned.
Sitting here now in my clean house, I’ve realised that I’m being silly. If I only have a small amount of time available, I tell myself it’s not worth doing anything until I can find a big time block like on a weekend. I like the idea of having a big chunk of time to get the whole, entire house done in one go. But realistically, I know I’d be way better off just tackling 20 minutes of cleaning a night. The short bit of extra effort on weeknights would free up my entire weekend for having fun or relaxing. It was something I started doing a while back and then somewhere along the line I got sidetracked and forgot about it, so here I am wasting an entire Sunday on cleaning. And ironically, it took writing my last blog post to realise this and remind me there’s a better way!
So, I’m making a pact: From now on, I’m going to do my best to fill any spare bits of time with jobs instead of putting them off. I’m going to do a bit of cleaning each day instead of waiting. And I’m reclaiming my weekends as family time. Who is with me? Let me know in the comments below how you manage your cleaning schedule – do you break it up over weeknights or do a weekend blitz like I’ve been doing?
