Self Help

Another way to organize your house cleaning is to “spring clean” one room at a time. Do it
completely, but don’t upset the whole house. You can learn to work without making a giant mess if you pay attention to what you are doing. One day as I stopped to pick up an item at a woman’s house, she made her apologies for the confusion and explained her daughters were cleaning their rooms. The mother had instructed them to take everything out of the bedroom and toss it into the hall. Other things came up and the project was delayed and so it stayed in the hallway all that night. In the end, all the stuff was put back and the bedroom looked nice, but the “processing” time was terrible.

Even from the front door you can tell something was happening. Suppose there are ten rooms in your house, and it takes you three days to deep-clean each one - that would be thirty days of total confusion! Some homes never look good because they are always “into a project.” The solution is not to cut out the activity, but to contain it. The reason Great-Grandma emptied the whole room was because the rugs had to be taken outside and beaten to remove the dirt. Now we have powerful vacuums so we don’t have to tear out a whole room to clean the floor. Keep the mess within that room if possible.

Straighten up after work sessions. Just because you are busy in one room doesn’t mean you can totally neglect other areas or you’ll never make any progress. Work so progress shows, without making a bigger mess in the process.

Should you be painting or need to empty a room, designate a second area for “storage” to hold everything while you are working, but try to disturb only one more room. Don’t let it take over the whole house. How will you choose which room to clean next? I tend to go by “need,” which means I use visual clues to prioritize.

Another possibility is to make a list of rooms, putting the kitchen in the list twice and then follow it through. One woman spotlights a “room for the month” (like ice cream flavor of the month). It reads: January and September: kitchen; February and October: family room and laundry; March and November: bedrooms. Summer months are for yard work, redecorating projects, the garage and canning.

It may help before you start to deep-clean a room to go in with a pencil and paper on a clipboard and survey the room. Check the walls, the drapes, the carpet, and the light fixtures and list everything that might need your attention. If you have written cleaning specifications for your rooms, most of this list will be ready. Cross off each cleaning task as it is done, so you’ll know where you stand.

Work on the target room until it’s finished. When the room is done, designate another area to concentrate on. You can accomplish this deep cleaning in one of two ways: (1) thirty minutes a day or (2) one three-hour block. I have been assuming here that you will be using the physical wall-boundaries to designate where to clean. Some workers prefer to group similar jobs - windows, light fixtures - at the same time. They like to go through the house and do all the dusting, vacuuming, or emptying of trash in one go-round. It does not matter whether you set up the cleaning routine according to activity or by room. Decide which cleaning pattern suits you and then start.