Maintenance Cleaning
Maintenance cleaning is a vital step in keeping our homes clean. Keeping up with a maintenance cleaning routine makes it easier for us to do the big cleaning jobs. Maintenance cleaning jobs double by the day. This is why it’s important to keep up with it, daily.
What is maintenance cleaning?
I consider maintenance cleaning to be the cleaning that must be done every single day to maintain a clean household. This can be different for everyone and doesn’t have to be set in stone. Everyone’s household needs are different.
For my home to remain clean at all times, I have to:
- Make the bed
- Tidy visible areas
- Do this dishes
- Do the laundry
- Wipe the flat kitchen surfaces (stove, counters, table)
- Wipe the bathroom counters
- Spot sweep
- Spot mop
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Why is Maintenance Cleaning Important?
Getting these things done every single day helps me to maintain my home. Always. Having these things done every day makes it very easy for me to get the big cleaning jobs done.
For instance, if I am planning to dust on Saturday, I want to be able to just go and start dusting. If I had to tidy a week’s worth of item build-up before I can start dusting, the actual dusting job would take significantly longer. But since I tidy the areas every day, it doesn’t take me but a minute or so to grab what is misplaced and put it back.
Whereas, if I didn’t do this every day, I’d be making multiple trips to put everything away. Then by the time I could actually start dusting, I would be super annoyed with the inhabitants of my home and I’d enter angry cleaning mode which is never a good thing… for anyone.
The Most Important Maintenance Cleaning Jobs
If you can’t get through the whole routine every day, don’t fret. Getting some of the jobs done is better than none of them. For me, the most important jobs that I am sure to do every day are the laundry and the dishes.
Laundry
Every single day, your family members wear, at minimum, one outfit, right? If you have diva kids you could be looking at even more than that. But for this example, we’ll go with one outfit per family member, per day.
So a family of say, three, accumulates at least 3 full outfits. That is three shirts, three pants, three underwear, six socks, and three bath towels (if you don’t reuse your towels. PS, I didn’t know this was a thing until well into my adult years).
That is 18 items you have to wash. PER DAY.
What sounds easier for you to do? Wash and pick up 18 items? Or wash and pick up 126 items at the end of the week?
Astonishing to think about, huh? Do you know how long it takes me to pick up one day’s worth of laundry? 7 minutes. I’ve timed it. And that’s generous.
I throw my laundry into the washer at night before bed. Switch it to the dryer in the morning (it dries in about 10-15 minutes) and before I run out the door, I pick it up.
My laundry never builds up and I save myself an entire day of work at the end of the week.
Dishes
Ya’ll, dishes are the same thing. It is just as important to do the dishes every day, if not more. The dishes double and triple by the day. Doing it every day makes a huge difference in the amount of time you put into washing dishes.
I load and unload the dishes as I cook. Every night before I go to bed I load the dishwasher and turn it on. In the morning, if I don’t have time to unload it, sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t, I unload and reload it while I cook.
I prefer to try and get it unloaded and picked up in the morning that way I can add the dishes that I use in the mornings to the dishwasher before I leave, but sometimes I only have the time to rinse what we’ve used and leave it until I get home. But one thing is for sure, dishes never sit in the sink overnight.
This way, no food gets stuck onto the dishes. I can easily rinse them and put them in the dishwasher. Or hand wash quickly and set to dry.
Want a Freebie? Use my free morning and evening cleaning routine printable as a guide to get you started on your journey to a more peaceful home.
Want one you can fill in yourself? Here you go.
The Impact of Maintenance Cleaning
I cannot put enough emphasis on how important maintenance cleaning is when it comes to keeping a home clean.
I wish someone had pointed this out to me years ago. Cleaning days were always full of the same things, over and over. Laundry, kitchen, floors, bathrooms… All the things that I don’t even bother with anymore on my “cleaning day”. By the time I was done doing all of these things on cleaning day, I was out of energy, willpower, and time to do the bigger jobs.
I am ashamed to admit that I had dust webs in the corners of my ceilings. I just never had the time to get to them. The cleaning I should have been doing daily took up too much of my time.
Now my cleaning days consist of huge jobs, like reorganizing or decluttering, vacuuming under furniture, steam cleaning couches and floors, washing bedding, DUSTING…
I, literally, never thought I’d be someone who has a dusted home… like, what is this?
Determining Your Maintenance Cleaning Musts
So how do you decide what should be a part of your maintenance cleaning routine? Well, what do you find yourself doing over and over again?
What is something that tends to build up constantly? Floors? Kitchen?
You’ll want to add things to your maintenance cleaning routine that are easy enough to do every day and that you do, often.
That’s why I have what I have on mine. If you find yourself dusting constantly and feel the need to have it done all the time, go ahead and choose one surface or area to dust every day. A quick swipe with that Swiffer duster and your dusting will be kept under control.
I used to think people who said “a little every day” was crazy because WHO in their right mind wants to clean every single day, aside from the fact that cleaning these things takes FOREVER? But the truth of the matter is that these cleaning tasks only take forever because they’ve built up for however long you’ve left in between doing them.
The idea of “it will be there tomorrow” is harmful when it comes to housework because, while yes, it will be there tomorrow, it will also be double the work tomorrow. And that is what makes cleaning so time consuming and difficult.
Be kind to the future you. Do a little today and save yourself a lot tomorrow.
Want a Freebie? Use my free morning and evening cleaning routine printable as a guide to get you started on your journey to a more peaceful home.
Want one you can fill in yourself? Here you go.