I'm busy, or I like to pretend to be. I dislike chores and cleaning. But you know what I dislike more than cleaning? The spazz-out-oh-my-god-people-are-coming-over cleaning. The we-need-to-spend-3-hours-before-dinner cleaning. I dislike that more.
Rewind to last year and Peter was traveling a lot for work. Like, weeks at a time with his only time home being a 2 or 3 day weekend. When he would leave, we wouldn't know when we would be back. I was also working in a job that wasn't a good fit, had a new dog with Giardia (read: uncontrollable diarrhea), whose treatment (and the stress of a new home) made him puke daily, who had no manners, and who had bonding issues. It was a rough winter.
However, when we did have a return date, we had the tendency to make plans to see people. And this meant cleaning.
So, to keep some of my sanity, I created a cleaning schedule. With everything else going on, I couldn't clean the whole house, nor did I want to, but I needed to make progress and so I started with assigning chores to specific days. Wednesdays was cleaning the litter boxes and putting out the trash, Saturday was litter boxes (again) and vacuuming. That simple schedule morphed into:
Sunday - laundry
Monday - living room & finish laundry
Wednesday - litter boxes, trash, & vacuuming the living room
Thursday - bathrooms
Friday - 2nd floor
Saturday - litter boxes, watering plants, & vacuuming the 1st floor
Over the holidays, we got a little sidetracked with removing wallpaper and visiting with family and friends, so the weekly chores weren't getting done. Now that we're back in the swing of things, I wanted to share how the whole 15-minutes-of-chores thing actually works. The next few weeks I'll track the before and after of my 15 minutes for the bathroom(s) and the 2nd floor.
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