A Cleaning Plan

A specification of one of my New Year's "resolutions" occurred to me as I was sweeping today. My goal this year is to keep the house clean. I have a vision of what this will be like, but I am wary of goals without plans. How am I going to keep up with it? Will the memory of how nice it was at New Year's Eve to see the clean gray floor and feel comfortable with anyone going in any room (except the office...) be enough? Seems unlikely.

But as I swept the carpet (urgently, before Marie scattered any more toys than she already had in the few minutes since she had come down after her nap), a plan seemed to come to mind.

For this month, January, I will keep the living room clean. 

Every day, I will pick everything up. Even toys that will be soon scattered again will be corralled, and Bible studies that will again be scattered on the couch will be properly shelved. That's actually harder than the toys...I may need to work on finding proper, regular places for things.

I will also sweep regularly. This I have found to be particularly helpful in getting rooms clean. Also, it's amazing how much cleaner they feel even if you didn't notice them being dirty before the sweeping. The feeling is very conducive to keeping up the habit.

I think I will add to this making sure the dishes are done, completely, every day. This is becoming easier to do as Jed isn't as demanding at night. The first two months it was difficult to get much accomplished during the evenings, and if I got behind it took two cleaning sessions to get the dishes done, so it was hard to catch up.

Hopefully after a month of focusing on this, living room and dish upkeep will be a habit. Then next month, I will add keeping the kitchen cleaned (aided by my already established habit of doing the dishes) and swept daily.

So, each month, I will add a cleaning habit. Perhaps if I am struggling to upkeep all of them, I'll have a catch-up month where I won't add any.

I'm excited, aren't you?

And this is why I don't share my blog...