The Monday Morning Clean

Welcome to 2010!

(OK, so this is a photo from last summer, but we need a little green right about now, don't we?)

As part of my only New Year's resolution, which is to get organized again, I'm getting back to the daily routine.

Monday morning is cleaning day over here. After the weekend the house generally needs it.

I'm no Martha Stewart and I try to get this done as quickly as possible.
If you move fast you get a bit of a workout too. No gym needed on Mondays.

1. Start a load of laundry
2. Wash the dishes, wipe the counters - 20 minutes
3. Straighten up and dust - 15 minutes
4. By now I can put the first load of laundry in the dryer and add a new one to the washing machine.  This is normally the last load, because I do a load of laundry every day.  Remember?
5. Take out garbage and recycling, wipe garbage can, replace bag - 5 minutes
6. Sweep and Swiffer® floors - 20 minutes
7. Empty wastepaper baskets - 5 minutes
8. Windex shiny surfaces: stainless steel trashcan, ss microwave, window above the sink, kitchen scale, sliding door - 2 minutes
9. Swish the bathrooms (wipe out sinks, toilet rims) - 3 minutes
10. Vacuum - 15 minutes
11. Fold first load of laundry and put second load in the dryer - 5 minutes

Total time: 1 hour 30 minutes
Woohoo!

Rags

I use cut-up old t-shirts for just about any task that requires a rag.

They're reusable, easy to launder, and I don't get upset when hubby grabs one to use for some or other dirty job in the garage.
There are always more where that one came from.

Weekday Cleaning

I'm not a fan of cleaning.  I've found that having a very specific routine for this makes it much less painful.  I'm a list person and checking things off gives me real satisfaction.

Over the next couple of weeks I will share with you how I keep my house in a semi-orderly state.  In the shortest time possible.  So I can do other things.

I have specific tasks for every day. Today I'll tell you what I do every weekday.  I'll go into the specific things for each day in a later post.

1. Do the dishes
2. Wipe the counters
3. Sweep the floor
4. Use the Dust Buster to pick up any visible debris on the carpets.
5. Straighten up a bit.  Putting things back in their spots every day reduces the mess on "big" cleaning day.
6. Do a load of laundry.

This takes no more than 15 minutes - 20 minutes if I decide to take out the trash and clean the cat sand.

My View: Swiffer® Sweeper Wet Cloths

My motivation for deciding to try these was to find something between monthly crawl-on-the-floor-on-your-hands-and-knees floor washing, and daily sweeping.

(Photo courtesy of amazon.com)

Here's what I found:
1. You have to sweep the floor before you use these. It will not pick up all the loose stuff.
2. One wet cloth will only clean about fifty square feet of floor before it's dry.
3. Flipping the swivel head over to be able to use the little scrubby side is such a pain that it's not really worth it.
4. You WILL still have to get down there and clean the corners every so often, which is why I'll have to stick to the monthly thing.

I use these once a week.
I'm cheap, so to overcome the fact that the cloth will only clean a fraction of my floor space, I fill the laundry sink with about a quarter inch of water and dip the end of the Swiffer® in there when it dries out.
I just shake it a little to remove the excess water and off I go.
I clean the heavy traffic areas (around the refrigerator and kitchen table) first so as to utilize the cleaning solution in the cloth.

This review is my personal opinion.
The Swiffer company is (obviously) not compensating me but if you need more information about this product, they answer many questions, especially on the safety of their products, on their web site.