Cleaning schedule? Moving into a larger house.

[summertimeshine]

So we just bought our first home and we will be over doubling our square feet. We are going from one toilet to three. One bedroom to three. One living room to a living room, dining room, and spare room. A very small kitchen to a larger kitchen --- you get the idea. I am good at keeping the house very picked up and the stuff put away (granted we only have fur children so far) but I am very concerned that I am not going to be able to keep the new house 'clean'.
Does anyone keep a regular cleaning schedule? I was thinking upstairs one week - down the next. Dh and I both work over full time, but I want to establish something so that we are in a good habit right from the git go.

[rstump]

I suggest Flylady or Motivated Moms...or the housekeeping challenge on here! it is great to have someone remind you not only to pick up the big stuff...but do things like baseboards, Refrig shelves, oven, etc.

We just moved again and almost doubled our sq footage. It is a lot to keep up with but we are also 7 people and home all day making a BIG mess. LOL. It isnt too bad once you get into a routine.

[Drew]

We both work full time (with hour commutes) and only have a fur ball baby at this point. We nearly tripled our square footage when we moved from an apartment to our first house just over a year ago. I was pretty worried about keeping everything clean as well. What I've discovered is the house is actually easier to keep clean because there is more space to put things. Meaning everything now has a home and I'm not shuffling things from room to room because I don't know what to do with it.

To be honest I do most of the cleaning at our house. I like things to be done a certain way so I find it easier on both of us if I just do them myself. :blush

For us the main messy area is the kitchen because we're trying to avoid eating out as much as possible. I clean the counters, take care of the dishes, and clean the kitchen table on a daily basis. I also try to clean the stove top on a daily basis but that's really only happening a couple of times a week right now.

I try to vacuum the hardwood a few times a week but other than that all of the cleaning gets done one the weekend. Other than the laundry I can usually knock everything out in a couple of hours. We don't wear shoes on the carpeting so it's fine with a weekly (or biweekly for the upstairs) vacuuming. The bathrooms all have ceramic tile floors which I vacuum weekly and mop probably monthly (except the immediate toilet area which gets hand washed more frequently).

[mom2threegirls]

I'm :popcorn on this thread. We moved into a bigger house (by 1000 square feet, and a bigger backyard) and I'm having a MUCH harder time keeping it clean! I LOVE our new house but I sure don't like cleaning it. That was one thing I definitely preferred about our small rambler :yes. I AM finding that by doing a little each day I can sort of stay on top of things, at least so it's presentable. Before I could laze around for a day or two if I wanted to or needed to because of other stuff going on and not really even think about cleaning and then when the place got really messy all it took was an hour or two. Not the case anymore!

[Drew]

Oops...

[RiverRock]

When we built our house we nearly quadrupled the size we had been living in, but I closed off certain areas of the house so I only had to clean the main floor. This worked until baby #3 meant a room shuffle and our oldest 2 moved to upstairs bedrooms (from the nursery..a tiny room off ours, and our office which was serving as a bedroom for our oldest). Now we have our oldest 3 in upstairs bedrooms, and our youngest in the nursery....and all rooms of our house are being occupied and used. It is a lot of cleaning and tidying!

Because of the size I will often break up a job like vacuuming into 2 days. Downstairs one day, upstairs the next. Laundry is another job I often break up: wash, dry and fold into baskets one day, put away the next (and do a quick tidy of bedrooms as I go). It's a matter of trial and error to find what works.

For a long time FlyLady's routines worked for me and helped me develop my own schedules. She has zones for each week, and because of the size of my house I just added rooms to various zones. It helped keep me focused, and I always had one room that felt clean. My worst habit with housekeeping is that I do a little in the living room, then go to the kitchen with a handful of dishes and wipe a little there, then remember the laundry so I do a quick sweep of rooms...and before I know it I have been bouncing around like a ping-pong ball for hours and still don't have a room that feels clean or entirely tended to! I also clean from peripheral rooms into my kitchen, bringing all the odds and ends to my island or desk area....then get sooo embarassed if someone stops over unexpectedly or dh gets home from work to see me scramble to make dinner amidst the chaos. :doh

All this to say that lists and routines help me a lot, and I usually have something to show for my efforts because rarely is the house all picked up and clean at one time.