A New Cleaning Schedule

I've been following the blog I Heart Organizing for a couple years now, and have gotten lots of great ideas for how to make my home more efficient and organized (not that I've followed through on all of them yet, but ideas are ideas folks). For the last couple of weeks she's been blogging about her quest to keep a cleaner house in less time. She's decided to tackle that by doing one small cleaning task a day, and even though I was intrigued with that concept I decided it's not best for me right now. I know a lot of people prefer to break their cleaning up into multiple days, but that's not appealing to me at this current stage in our family. I don't enjoy cleaning day - which happens to be today...ugh - but it's one day and I can end the day knowing that the house is clean for another week, give or take a couple tasks that need touch-ups in between Thursdays. My days fill up faster than I expect them to and it just works better for me to have one day out of the week that I tank with things I don't enjoy, like cleaning and laundry, rather than spread them out all week long.

That all being said, I have taken away some great ideas for ways to clean our house differently from Jen's cleaning challenge over at IHeart. She's blogged about some things she's cleaned that have made me say "oh...duh...that's embarrassing that I've never done that." So I've decided to switch things up the tiniest of bits in my cleaning regimen, but I'm actually just adding quite a few tasks that will show up on a monthly and bi-annual basis. My weekly cleaning schedule won't change, and just because it's pretty basic I won't share it here. But here are my new additions:

Monthly Cleaning:
-clean all windows
-vacuum out cars
-clean microwave
-cycle clean appliances
-vacuum mattresses
-wipe down all doors
-clean inside of fridge
-clean out freezer
-clean oven
-clean out pantry
-purge unneeded items around house
-reorganize a drawer or closet

Bi-Annual Cleaning (spring and fall):
-scrub baseboards
-clean screens
-complete clothes overhaul and purge
-purge entertainment

Since it's the middle of a month, I decided to wait until April to start with the monthly cleaning, and I chose May and October for my spring and fall cleaning. Yes, there's only five months between May and October, but I figured no one would want to be cleaning screens in either April or November. I'm excited to see how this changes the maintained cleanliness as well as the functionality of our home. I definitely won't blog about every item I tackle on these lists, but I will try to at least share some before/after pics and follow up on how it's working. I'm sure it will need to be tweaked over time and I'm also sure I'll add to the lists as I find/discover/come up with more that needs to be done.