Great Falls Lifestyle Photographer | Cleaning Calendar

How many of you have already thrown in the towel on your New Year’s resolutions? Be honest. Yeah, you…. Well…you know that adorable quote, “Aim for the moon, because even if you miss you will land among the stars”? That’s my New Year’s resolution strategy. My resolution list is so long, I have to scroll through it like it’s a Facebook feed (a.k.a. never-ending). But I figure that if I have a lot of them, odds are that some of them might actually happen. Smart, right?! And my resolutions range from business-related to family to health. I really didn’t want to leave any category out. That would just be rude. And too practical.

So…one of those resolutions is mostly in the “organization” category, but it also fits within “family” and “sanity” categories. Drum roll………CLEANING. Ugh…it might as well be a four-letter word. But I also feel completely stressed out when my house is chaotically messy…mostly because it’s already chaotic. And when you add “messy”? Not a good combination.

So my previous cleaning pattern has been to push as much of the cleaning, laundry, and picking up until the weekend when I felt like I had time. Which means that for the past thousand weekends I have been feeling chained to my house. When my family has something fun planned? I’m missing out on fully enjoying those activities because I’m thinking about the mess I still have to take care of before Monday. Yuck.

My new solution (and resolution): a cleaning schedule. Not just a schedule, but one that I can make a habit. The whole idea behind this is having one cleaning task per night (along with the daily tasks like picking up, dishes, laundry), so that it doesn’t pile up and become a giant mountain-of-a-job.

I am happy to say that I have been following this for a week, and…so far, so good! Every morning before work, I throw in a load of laundry and set the timer so that it won’t start until a couple hours before I get home from work (so that I don’t have to deal with mildew smell on my clean clothes!). When I come home, I immediately move that load to the dryer so it get’s folded, hung, and put away before bed time. I take care of the dishes, and then I’m on to whichever task I’ve outlined for that day: Main Bath, Master Bath, Downstairs Bath, Vacuuming, Mopping, Dusting, and Windows. And voila! A clean house, my weekends are released from captivity, and I’m a happier mama!

I was hoping to find a cute customizable “cleaning calendar” online that I could hang up in my house to be my daily reminder (kind of like my own vision board for avoiding a pig sty), but no luck. I searched all the keywords I could think of, but couldn’t find anything. And after I realized how much time I had devoted to Google, I just decided to create my own! The benefits of being a photographer and knowing some good ol’ Photoshop….

I ended up having this image printed on a matte metal material to make it look a little more vintage (to go along with the rest of the decor in my house), and I love how it turned out! And what about you guys?! I didn’t forget about you! If you want to have a little reminder of your own, I created a fill-in-the-blank cleaning schedule for you to download and use if you want to try this whole thing out! Don’t worry: I reversed the black and white of my original image so you don’t have to use a whole ink cartridge on one print :)