Cleaning up

Ok, now that we have the meal planning back in order, it's time to shift our attention to the state of the house. Now, I've never been any kind of housekeeper - anyone whose seen my living room or my office can attest to that! But, hubby was a neat-nick before he met me. He's since given up because it's too hard to keep up with my slovenly ways, but once in a while I feel the need to respect his sense of order and tidiness.

And so, I present, the cleaning schedule! I've probably presented it before - it's not a new concept. It's quite simple, really.

The house is divided into eight zones:
kitchen
dining room
living room
hall bath
master bath
bedroom
computer room
spare room.

Each of us is assigned to one zone each week. This means that, every month, the whole house gets a good cleaning. The task list includes:

clear out clutter
take out garbage/recycling
vacuum (if applicable - we only have two rooms with carpet now!)
sweep/mop (quite a job with all the dog mud around here!)
dust (including cobwebs and windowsills
wipe down walls (Ringo rubs on the walls so there's a nice layer of dirt about two and a half feet up, everywhere you got)
scrub countertops (in those rooms that have them)

Now, for those of you who are into a regular weekly cleaning routine, this probably is quite obvious and you're probably cringing at the thought of only having rooms clean once a month. But for those of you like me who only clean when company's coming (which, for us, isn't often) and then only clean the rooms that company will see, this is a really necessary thing!

We've started this before, several times, but when we got to the two really challenging rooms, the computer room and spare room, things have ground to a halt because the tasks really just seemed too daunting. But, in the last month, we've completely cleaned out both rooms, so we're really just into maintenance now, which should make things a lot easier.

I'll let you know how it goes!