The Ultimate Guide to Making a Cleaning Checklist

Are you having trouble keeping up with chores, forming cleaning habits or using a cleaning checklist?

It is frustrating, discouraging, and overwhelming to try so hard and still feel like it’s a losing battle to keep your home in order.

Today we’ll be covering common reasons most cleaning schedules don’t work, how to know what will work better for you, and how to actually implement it.

From my own experience – and lots of research! – I know that making these corrections can change the way you relate to your home. They may seem simple at first glance, but there is SO much to unpack in each one. 

Click below to jump to a specific section or scroll down to start from the top.

• Why Other Cleaning Schedules May Have Failed You
• How to Create a House Cleaning Schedule that Works for You
• 6 Tips to Make Your Home Cleaning Schedule Work Better

As you’ll see, making and maintaining your own Cleaning Checklist is a lot of work…

This is why we highly recommend using our custom cleaning schedule generator, Home, Clean Home, instead! This will take care of pretty much all the work outlined in this article. You can download it for free below!

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This sort of income helps make this blog possible, so thank you!

Why Other Cleaning Checklists May Have Failed You

Before getting into the benefits of using a custom checklist, let’s go over why so many pre-made schedules don’t work.

Before getting into the benefits of using a custom checklist, let’s go over why so many pre-made schedules don’t work.

1. It’s one-size-fits-all.

No one schedule can meet the needs of different homes, lifestyles, family structures, personalities and preferences. Maybe you want to deep-clean your fridge every week, or maybe you’ll be just fine if you can get to it once a year. (Me… that’s me.)

2. It’s in too many pieces.

A quick search will give you plenty of options – daily, weekly, monthly lists and maintenance checklists for each season – all with different recommendations. No one has time to merge 10,000 different lists to get one that actually tells you everything that needs to be done.

3. It focuses on tasks, not habits.

Even if you do find a list that fits your personality and your home, you’re often left with just that: a list. Tons of tasks and plenty of good intentions – but not a plan for how to get them done. Habits are the key to really getting everything you can out of a cleaning checklist.

4. It often feels like cleaning for cleaning’s sake.

If the tasks & their recommended frequencies are not aligned with the needs of your home and family, it will eventually feel like a meaningless standard – rather than a way for you to maintain a space you enjoy.

5. It provides expectation, not motivation.

This sort of standard from someone else makes you feel like you “should” do something, rather than being motivated by the value and benefits it will bring you and your family. A list of tasks doesn’t get you to a sustainable cleaning system any more than a “Couch to 5k” plan makes you a consistent runner.

How to Create a House Cleaning Checklist that Works for You

I’ve spent years putting together a complete system like this for our family, and I’m so excited to get to share it with you.

This section will help you understand the logic behind creating a cleaning schedule that works

Start by Defining what “Clean” Looks like to You

I am a huge proponent of customizing your chore checklist to meet your home’s needs, your time constraints, and your personality.

With so many cleaning schedules out there, we can easily put a lot of pressure and burden on ourselves to measure up to other people’s standards.

However, I want you to approach your cleaning checklist with a sense of empowerment, freedom, and discernment of what’s best for your family and your situation.

Your home is a tool that serves you by providing shelter, a place of rest, and a space to gather. All of your efforts in maintaining, cleaning, and decluttering should primarily support those goals and serve you both mentally and physically. And you’re in charge! 🙂

To make a chore schedule that really works for you, you can let go of others’ expectations and:

• Choose which tasks apply to you / your home, and omit the rest
• Change how often a task “should” be done in your home

The 4 Levels of Cleaning

First, this system is based on levels of cleaning — comprehensive lists of similar types of tasks, built into a rotating system. We’ll be covering each of these levels in more depth below.

1. Daily Rhythms

These are morning & evening routines that allow your home to function on a basic level – even if nothing else gets done! Examples include making the bed, starting a load of laundry, doing the dishes, straightening living areas, etc. Most of these can be taken care of in 5 minutes or less!

2. Weekly Routines

A weekly list addresses regular tasks needed to keep your space reasonably clean & tidy – so that it can be enjoyed by your family and others. Examples include cleaning the bathrooms, vacuuming, dusting, etc.

3. Monthly Cleaning

This is the first layer of more preventative, proactive cleaning – and includes items that are often overlooked. Examples include checking your fire extinguisher, disinfecting dish tools, etc.

4. Seasonal Rotation

A comprehensive, rotating list includes ALL tasks needed to preventatively maintain, deep-clean, or organize every aspect of your home. Tasks are assigned at the appropriate time of year for seasonal needs. Examples range from cleaning/decluttering your garage to inspecting your attic to deep-cleaning your fridge.

It takes defining each of these levels – and like we mentioned earlier, implementing these rhythms and forming habits over time

Split Chores into 3 Categories

Next, I want to introduce you to 3 ways to think about the chores in your schedule. Each will help you decide how to customize, adjust, and prioritize tasks to accomplish your goals – efficiently and effectively.

• Preventative Maintenance – needs to be done to keep things maintained and prevent repairs and other issues
• Preferential Cleaning – focuses on what makes you feel at-home and at-peace in your environment
• Proactive Cleaning – makes it easy to clean, rather than letting messes build up

1. Preventative Maintenance

Let me start first by saying that preventative maintenance items are usually best done as recommended. Many are related to the structure of your home, function of important systems, and your family’s safety. Examples include:

• Changing HVAC filters
• Inspecting or servicing home systems and appliances
• Checking fire extinguishers or smoke detectors

By taking care of these items as part of a chore schedule, you will save significant time and expense by avoiding issues and repairs down the road.

Fortunately these tasks don’t make up the majority of the tasks involved with taking care of your home, nor are they usually time-consuming.

Prioritize these preventative tasks in your chore schedule by adding them first.

2. Preferential Cleaning

This is the “preferential” cleaning – something we don’t always give ourselves freedom to consider, but that is essential to making a cleaning schedule that works for us.

Think through the areas of your home to identify:

• Which areas do I feel most stressed or unsettled when they are messy or cluttered?

These important areas will tell you what to prioritize and clean most regularly. If it bothers you when it is messy or cluttered, set a regular task of cleaning it.

Secondly, after you identify the specific areas, consider how often you notice these things being unclean/untidy. This could be daily, weekly, monthly, etc. This will give you insight into how often you need to address these areas. 

3. Proactive Cleaning

There is a lot to be said for regular cleaning. It prevents messes and build-up getting so strong that it takes MORE time for us to clean it than if we had handled it in the first place.

For example, a male friend of mine in college went months without cleaning his bathroom. You can imagine the state of it when he eventually got around to cleaning it. It took him an entire weekend to scrub all the grime built-up around the bathroom.

I’m sure this is not the situation you find yourself in. Still, it’s important to remember that regular cleaning is easier than deep cleaning after letting things build up. By sticking fairly close to the recommended frequencies, you will save yourself time and effort overall. Plus, have the pleasure of enjoying a clean space.

However, on the other hand…

we can also commit ourselves to cleaning so regularly that it can feel pointless if there’s not a lot of evidence that the area needs to be clean. This will only lead us to procrastinate, do a half-hearted job, or even give up entirely on our schedule.  

I’ll give you a quick example from my pre-kiddo life. Before our son was born, we steamed our floor every other week. However, with just two adults at home primarily in the evening, not much mess built-up in that time. It felt like a waste of time, and I would regularly put it off. So, we eventually switched to a deep-cleaning once a month with spot-cleaning as needed in between. When it rolled around, I felt like it needed to be done, and I gave it a good effort. That’s the main point. (Nowadays I can’t even get a week without steaming our floors thanks to our toddler in the house!)

So, like many things in life, I recommend finding the balance between these extremes. Clean proactively (to avoid messes) but only as often as needed (to make the most of your time). Be kind to yourself by setting realistic, productive, minimalist goals. 🙂

Consider how long it takes until you notice each area in your home becoming unclean. Let this timeframe roughly determine your personal frequency of cleaning that space.

6 Tips to Make Your Home Cleaning Checklist Work Better

Now it’s time to put all this together into a checklist that will work for you. These are all things that we prioritized when making Home, Clean Home, so these steps should be simple to follow when filling out the form.

Once again, if you want to give Home, Clean Home a try, and put everything in this article to work, download it for free below!

1. Remove anything that doesn’t apply to your home.

At first glance, this may seem overly simple. And, it certainly is the most obvious thing to do.

Still, many of us don’t take the time to remove tasks that don’t apply to our homes, which is why we often end up falling behind. We just skip over it whenever we reference our schedule, but that has some negative side effects.

• It makes our list longer, which increases our chances of overestimating the time needed and procrastinating.
• Our mind fills with more “clutter” – as if we didn’t have enough responsibilities floating around in there!
• It makes it harder to delegate tasks or work with others, because it requires time and energy to review and explain the list.

What to remove when editing a checklist:

• Check for any rooms that your home doesn’t have: bonus room, office, sunroom, garage, basement, etc.)
• Are there any appliances you don’t own (microwave, ice maker, deep freezer, washer & dryer, wine cooler, etc.)
• Check for any home systems or materials that don’t apply to you (hard/soft water, crawl space/foundation, AC, heating, gas, irrigation, solar, smart home systems, etc.)
• Check for any maintenance items you are not responsible for, if you don’t own your home.

Anything that doesn’t make sense for your home, just delete it!

My only precaution: if you aren’t sure what a task means, do a quick Google search to make sure it isn’t a necessary maintenance task for your home. 🙂

2. Add in all the specifics of your home and possessions.

Now that you have a clean slate, it’s time to ADD what may be missing – because if your list isn’t completely comprehensive, you defeat the purpose of having a checklist at all.

Here’s what I mean.

A checklist is meant to take ALL those tasks you keep track of in your head and put them in a list that does that work for you.

But often, only some of our tasks are in the checklist, and we continue to keep track of all the additional work and exceptions in our minds. This means we are probably still worried about what to do, when to do it, and if things are slipping through the cracks.

It’s worth the time to include every little task on your list, so you can truly rely on it to do this mental work for you. It will bring a lot of clarity, peace of mind, and direction!

Following a similar list from before, consider the specifics of your home that may not be included.

• Do you have any specific rooms or areas in your home that AREN’T included? (mudroom, bonus room, office, home theater, sunroom, garage, basement, etc.)
• Are there any additional structures on your property? (Workshop/shred, deck, patio, firepit, pool, play set, etc.)
• Do you own any unusual appliances or equipment that need to be cleaned or maintained regularly? (Ice maker, deep freezer, wine cooler, electronics, cooking appliances, etc.)
• Are all your specific home systems or materials accounted for? (Do you have hard/soft water, crawl space/foundation, AC/heating, gas/electric, irrigation, solar, smart home systems, etc.)
• Are there any other home maintenance tasks you find yourself forgetting? 

One thing to keep in mind: Nothing is final! You can add to this list whenever you notice or remember tasks that would be helpful to include in your schedule.

3. Include all types of home care

We often create schedules that are focused solely on cleaning, but we all know a LOT more goes into caring for a home than that.

In order to reap the full benefits of a comprehensive schedule, be sure to include maintenance AND decluttering tasks, as they apply to you.

We’ve already touched on maintenance in the previous section. These are usually time-sensitive and safety-related, so it’s especially important to know you have these covered. 

For decluttering, it is much easier to “do this as you go” instead of making it a big project every year. Consider tweaking tasks like “clean the bedroom” to “clean AND declutter the bedroom” to hold yourself accountable.

Bonus, decluttering only makes the cleaning easier!

4. Be honest about your preferences

While less obvious, I think this is the key in making a home cleaning schedule work for you:

A generic cleaning checklist reflects someone else’s preferences, personality, lifestyle, and standards. When it is presented in a checklist, we all just accept those as a universal standard for everyone, despite our vast differences.

This can only result in overwhelm, frustration, feelings of failure, and giving up.

What we need to know is that we are free to do what works for us.

As we mentioned before, some maintenance or safety items do need to be completed at a specific time. But everything else is truly up to you.

For example, these are actual tasks recommended WEEKLY on some cleaning schedules I found:

• Clean baseboards
• Wash windows
• Deep clean fridge

I only do these things once a year! 😉

On the other hand, there are a LOT of things I clean more often now that we have a toddler – things I hardly ever cleaned when it was just my husband and me at home.

The point is that everyone has a different definition of what “clean” is – and that’s okay!

As you go through a cleaning checklist, or as you are putting one together, think about how often it takes for you to think “I need to clean that.” Then schedule it at that interval.

Your house could get really dusty after only a week, maybe it doesn’t.

Maybe your toilet gets gross after 3 days, maybe it takes 2 weeks.

Maybe you like clean sheets every day, every week, or every month.

You get the point. 

Just give yourself the freedom to be honest about what works for you and release the pressure of living up to others’ standards. They simply don’t apply to you. 🙂

5. Align your tasks with your ultimate goals

Unfortunately, I know that the advice above can be easier said than done! 

We often have deep-rooted expectations of how clean & tidy our homes should be, based on our upbringing, comparison to friends and neighbors, and the constant unrealistic standards of advertising and social media.

If you are struggling to know what would really work for you – especially if you are in a demanding season of life and need to limit your workload – consider shifting your mindset to the ultimate goals you have for your home.

Most commonly, and most fundamentally, we want our homes to provide:

• Shelter
• A personal space to enjoy and rest
• A place to gather

So if you are overwhelmed by expectations or struggling to cut back on tasks, then ask yourself:

• Is this task needed to maintain the structural integrity or safety of our home?
• Do I need to do this in order to enjoy being in my home?
• Is this necessary in order for my family or friends to gather in our home?

You can tweak the questions to match what matters to you. My encouragement is simply to “begin with the end in mind”, as Stephen Covey says, and enjoy the clarity it provides in prioritizing your work.

► Related Resource: 7 Solutions to Make Overwhelming Housework Manageable

6. Keep your cleaning checklist in an editable format

To end on a practical note, make sure that you keep the final version of your cleaning checklist in something you can edit — because likely, it won’t be your final version. 🙂

You may make changes as you:

• Decide some tasks need to be done more/less often
• Get rid of items, or acquire new ones
• Move to a new home
• Enter a new season of life

Often, cleaning checklists are offered as pretty PDFs but you don’t have the option to edit them.

While you may sacrifice “style”, I recommend simply using a Microsoft Word document, a to-do list app, or whatever works for you. It’ll make it much easier to keep your list updated as you go along.

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What’s next?

The reason most cleaning checklists don’t work is that they aren’t nearly personalized enough. We hope this guide paired with Home, Clean Home, can help you create a cleaning checklist that actually works.

If you are struggling to find a cleaning checklist and/or feeling overwhelming by how to implement it, download Home, Clean Home for free below.

Other Cleaning Articles:

• Custom Cleaning Schedule Download – Home, Clean Home
• Forming Cleaning Habits that Stick: The Ultimate Guide
• Quick Cleaning Tips for When You Only Have 5 Minutes
• How to Declutter Your Home: Transforming Chaos into Calm
• How to Clean A Shower Head: Removing Grime and Buildup
• How to Make Your Own Homemade Cleaning Products
• How to Clean A Bathtub: From Basic Washes to Deep Cleans
• 10 Tips for Using a Chore Chart (+ Inspo Ideas!)
• 12 Solutions for Not getting Enough Help around the House
• How to Keep up with Housework: 7 Simple Solutions
• Bissell Steam Mop Review: The Better Way to Clean Floors
• 17 of the Best Cleaning Products on Amazon
• Quick Cleaning Tips for When You Only Have 5 Minutes

By: Brennan Brown