House Cleaning Schedule and Printable Checklist

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A house cleaning schedule is an awesome way to reduce your overwhelm when it comes to keeping your house clean! This printable file can help walk you through your cleaning process and keep you organized while you clean your home.

Free printable house cleaning checklist

A couple of months ago I shared an Instagram story of me cleaning our bathroom floors, and you all were here for it. Turns out y’all like seeing me scrubbing things!

Haha! Kidding aside, I think what resonated was the fact that I’m a real person with real toilets to clean, just like everybody.

It was a little peek behind the curtain of how our home runs, and the fact that we do all the cleaning ourselves.

And bunches of you asked for a breakdown of our house cleaning schedule, so we are doing you one better: our house cleaning schedule and a printable checklist that you can download while you’re cleaning too.

Before you dive in, make sure you grab our downloadable kids’ chore chart so they can help too! Also check out these 13 productivity tips to take stress and overwhelm out of your days.

Pink sofa seating area in a home office

Why A House Cleaning Schedule?

Let’s start with a little backstory. I’ve cleaned my own home for my entire life, with the exception of about one year after Maggie was born.

I was overwhelmed and so we splurged on a cleaning service. They came every other week for about 3 hours and did a thorough scrub of the house.

I always did the daily tidying, dishes, laundry, etc., myself. But those hours that they spent scrubbing floors and toilets were totally invaluable.

After about a year, we started saving to send Maggie to preschool so we discontinued the cleaning service. However, I decided to try to keep their schedule as best as we could.

It’s been about two years since we did that and so far the process is working really well for our family. I wanted to find a way that I could keep our house clean without feeling overwhelmed or consumed by it.

So here’s our house cleaning schedule.

house cleaning schedule

Our House Cleaning Schedule

Daily

It’s a feat with two young kids, and we’re not always spot on, but we try to end every day with a clutter-free house. We’re working with the kids to teach them to clean as they go (i.e., they have to put away one mess before they make another).

We also take about 5 minutes as a family before their bedtime to tidy everything we can.

Toys get cleaned up, dishes get put away, and so on. Everybody pitches in and it goes relatively quickly.

Like I said, it’s not always perfect, but even an attempt at tidying keeps things from stacking up over the course of the week.

clean yellow tile floor in a master bathroom

Weekly

Here’s where the house cleaning schedule starts to really come into play. Friday is my laundry day. Because we work at home, I have the capability to switch laundry loads in and out throughout the day.

We usually have about 4-5 loads of laundry on Fridays between all of our clothes and the towels/bedding.

I run them all through and just leave the clean clothes piled on the dining table until the end of the day, when I tackle folding it all at once. (Batch working for the win!) We change bed sheets every other week.

Now that the kids are older, they help fold and put away towels and their own clothes.

We also have this thing we call “Tidy Fridy.” (And yeah, I left the “a” out of Friday to make it rhyme. Don’t judge me, the rhyming makes it seem less like cleaning and more like fun. 😉 )

On Fridays, at the end of the day we kick our daily tidying routine up a notch and make sure everything is put away and clean.

This is for two reasons: first, I like to start the weekend with a clean house. And secondly, every other Saturday is our scrubbing day.

clean guest bathroom

Every Other Week

If it’s a cleaning week, I try to sneak in a couple of chores in on Friday to make Saturday go more quickly. Usually I dust all of the rooms in the house to get that checked off the list.

Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I can squeeze in vacuuming too.

Otherwise, every other Saturday morning is when we clean and use the house cleaning schedule.

And this is where our printable cleaning checklist comes in handy! You can find it at the bottom of the post!

Boy's big kid room ideas

MY CLEANING ROUTINE

If I’ve dusted the day before, I start in the bathrooms. We have three. Lots of you on Instagram said that you have cleaning supplies stocked in each bathroom. But I prefer to carry around a single cleaning caddy with me.

We have a little basket that I have stocked with our favorite cleaning supplies, rags, and gloves. (I always wear gloves or my hands get dry and crack!)

So I check everything off the bathrooms list, then move to the extra rooms like the Laundry or Office to get any random sinks or surfaces.

I try to delay the kitchen until last because there’s a greater chance it will stay clean for longer if I wait. As soon as we make the kids a meal in there, it’s done for.

After all that is checked off, I tackle all the floors. We have hardwood with tile bathrooms and linoleum in the kitchen, so usually I vacuum the entire floor (including area rugs).

Then I go back and either dust mop or mop, depending on the surface. I do the bathroom floors as I finish each bathroom. Those I do old school, on my hands and knees with a spray bottle of cleaning solution and a rag.

Edited, now that our kids are older: With an 8 and a 6 year old, lots of these tasks get spread around now. I arm the kids with kid-sized gloves and have them do simpler tasks like clean low windows, dust baseboards, and scrub toilets (with nontoxic cleaners).

As they grow, they can take on more responsibilities — especially if you take some time to teach them how to clean effectively (so you don’t have to repeat the tasks they have already done).

clean kids room in house with yellow closet doors

Seasonally

There are definitely a few things that we don’t tackle every cleaning day on our house cleaning schedule, that I just sort of squeeze in when I remember.

These are things like dusting the baseboards, cleaning out the freezer, and so on. Truthfully, they probably get done way less frequently than they should, but hey, I’m good with that.

How Long Should Cleaning Your House Take?

All in all, if I’m doing everything by myself it takes me about 2.5 hours. If I dust and/or vacuum the day before, or if Ryan does the floors for me, the whole list takes less than two hours.

Obviously, your home size will affect time. We live in a 3-bedroom, 3-bathroom home, with two large living spaces and a dining room.

You’ll probably find that the bathrooms are where most of your time is spent, so more or fewer baths will change up your timeline.

This applies to my every-other-week, standard cleaning schedule. If I’m adding in something seasonal or monthly, like baseboards for example, it obviously would take a bit longer.

But all in all, a house cleaning schedule will help you organize so that your chores won’t take nearly as long as you think they will.

Also, now that the kids are getting older, they can help so much! This lessens my own time spend as well.

Download the House Cleaning Schedule

Click below to download the House Cleaning Chart and Checklist!

We created the checklist based on our home and some feedback about the size and type of home that you have, too. If you need to modify it, just add things to the “Extras” list, or print out a second chart for more rooms.

I also recommend these self-laminating sheets if you’d like to laminate and reuse your schedule.

And that’s it, gang! I hope our cleaning chart and house cleaning schedule helps you feel less overwhelm when it comes to keeping your space clean. Any questions, hit me with them in the comments! xo

P.S. Get our kids’ chore chart right here! You’ll probably also love our printable summer routine, book plate history, and puzzle history sticker!

House cleaning schedule

House Cleaning Schedule

Yield: A Clean House!
Active Time: 3 hours
Total Time: 3 hours
Difficulty: Easy
Estimated Cost: $2

Print our house cleaning schedule and follow our process for keeping your house clean the easy way, without cleaners or a maid!

Materials

  • Printable house cleaning checklist

Tools

  • Cleaning supplies

Instructions

  1. Download and print our house cleaning schedule.
  2. Add any extras to your printed list.
  3. Decide on a cleaning day (i.e. we scrub every two weeks).
  4. At the end of every day, tidy your home with your family. Take 5 minutes and do whatever you can.
  5. Reserve laundry day for once a week.
  6. The day before your designated cleaning day, tidy your house. If you can, also dust and vacuum.
  7. On cleaning day, follow the checklist to ensure you tackle your whole house in an efficient way.

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17 Comments

  1. I love seeing how other people clean their homes, and the way you break it down makes it seem totally manageable! Also, it would be cute to print out that checklist and put it in a frame with glass so you can use it as a dry-erase board (instead of printing it out every time 😉 ). Thanks for sharing, Chelsea!

  2. Thank you so much for sharing! My husband and I just bought our first house and with twin toddlers, I’m going to need all the help I can get to keep it clean. This checklist is great. Would you also be open to sharing the cleaning supplies you use?

  3. Pingback: Cleaning – Getting Your Life Together – Sincerely Trifa
  4. This looks perfect for something I can print off for my house cleaners. You might be surprised keeping track and allocating tasks for house cleaning can even be difficult for real professionals. Thanks for sharing this great idea.

    Truly yours,
    Taylor McLean
    The Pressure Washing Pros
    http://www.pressurewashpro.ca