![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coraaLast post! (For reference, the prior installments are: Part One: Caveats and Things You Can Ignore, Part Two: Things I Actually Do Use, Part Three: Things That Are Infuriating, and Part Four: Routines.) This is how I do 'zone cleaning,' which is the way you work your way around the house at 15 minutes a day, and hopefully reduce the need for cleaning sprees/spring cleaning in the process.
Zones are tied to weeks -- each week in a month has its own zone. This means that the first and last weeks of a month are often short weeks -- howevermany days there are between the first of the month and the first Saturday of the month, or the last Sunday of the month and the 30th/31st. That's fine. It just means you shuffle areas that need less attention to those days.
The official FlyLady breakdown goes like this:
Zone 1: Entrance/front porch/dining room
Zone 2: Kitchen/ back porch/laundry room/pantry
Zone 3: Main bathroom/extra bedroom/ kid's rooms/ craft room
Zone 4: Master bedroom/bath/closet
Zone 5: Living room/den/TV room
This list works great for some kinds of houses; it doesn't work so great for mine. For one thing, with a three-floor townhouse it makes a lot more sense to stay on one floor at time per zone. For another thing, the dining room isn't actually a separate room from the living room, and treating it like it is doesn't make much sense. For a third thing, the master bedroom doesn't need all that much maintenance, so giving it a full week and giving the living room a half-week doesn't fit. So, naturally, I just rearranged the weeks to my liking:
Zone 1: Entrance (including front closet)/front porch/garage
Zone 2: Kitchen/refrigerator/pantry
Zone 3: Living room/dining room/second-floor hallways
Zone 4: Office (including closet)/laundry room/bathrooms/third-floor hallways
Zone 5: Master bedroom (including closet)
The other thing you'll note is that chores that come up on the daily or weekly routines don't come up here. I roomba the bedroom as part of the weekly routine, so I don't have it on this list. I declutter as part of the weekly routine, so I don't have it on the list.
So how do I use these lists? Well, every day I have a fifteen-minute 'zone cleaning' slot (for me, it's right after work). At that point, I flip the Control Journal open to my current zone and look at the zone cleaning list there, then set a timer for 15 minutes. I pick a task and do it until I'm done with it, or until the timer has gone off. (If the timer goes off mid-task, I just put away my cleaning materials and stop then.) When I'm done, I cross the task off the list. If the timer has not yet gone off, I pick another task and keep working until it does. Many tasks take less than a minute, so I can often zip through a big chunk of the cleaning list in one go. The next day, when I'm in the zone cleaning time again, I pick an un-crossed-off task and keep going. I probably won't get through all of the cleaning tasks for an area in a week... but I will get through a lot of them, and over the course of a couple of months I'll eventually hit everything. If I run out of tasks before I run out of week, then yay, I get extra free time the remaining days of that week.
A side note on decluttering: if a room is really cluttered, the general recommendation is that you should just spend your 15 minutes of zone cleaning every day decluttering that room (when you're in its zone, I mean) until it's less clutterful. This is because it is hard to, e.g., vacuum a floor that is covered in stuff, or dust a table that is covered in stuff. For me, a hybrid approach works best: the kitchen is largely decluttered, so I do ordinary 'zone cleaning' in it every day. The office, however, is still only half-decluttered, so I alternate: one day I declutter, the next day I do cleaning. Back when the office was thoroughly cluttered (in that way where I couldn't see the floor), there was no point trying to clean around the stuff, so I decluttered every day. Your mileage, as always, may vary.
On to the individual zones. Remember: you can rearrange these however you like! If you have no laundry room, for instance, by all means spend that time somewhere else. If your master bedroom does need a full week, give it one, and stick something else in the half-week spot. Etc. Similarly, if you go 'wtf is with wiping down the front door? who cares if the front door is dusty?', then, well, don't put it on your list! Simple.
Zone One: Front porch/entrance (including closet)/garage
Front Porch (Exterior)
Entryway (including closet) (Interior)
Garage
Note: Most garage cleaning is not my purview; it's![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jmpava's. That's why the "Garage" list is so very, very short. If I were responsible for more garage tasks, there'd be more garage tasks on the list.
Zone Two: Kitchen/refrigerator/pantry
Kitchen/Refrigerator
Pantry
I do this one shelf at a time, from most-relevant (baking goods shelf, which gets really messy really fast because flour tends to get everywhere) to least-relevant (canned items, which last forever and don't spill).
Zone Three: Living room/dining room/second-floor hallways
Living room and dining room are essentially one room for me, so I lump them together.
Zone Four: Office (including closet)/laundry room/bathrooms/third-floor hallways
Office
Laundry Room
Bathrooms
Hallway
Zone Five: Master bedroom (including closet)
Bedroom
Closet/Dresser
As with the office,jmpava's clothes are his to organize, so I just shove them back onto his shelves if they start to encroach. ;)
And that's it. Every day I do a morning and evening routine, fifteen minutes of day-of-the-week routine, and fifteen minutes of zone cleaning or decluttering. It... does not result in an immaculate house! But it results in a much better house than I would otherwise have.
If you have any other questions about how I do it, let me know.
Zones are tied to weeks -- each week in a month has its own zone. This means that the first and last weeks of a month are often short weeks -- howevermany days there are between the first of the month and the first Saturday of the month, or the last Sunday of the month and the 30th/31st. That's fine. It just means you shuffle areas that need less attention to those days.
The official FlyLady breakdown goes like this:
Zone 1: Entrance/front porch/dining room
Zone 2: Kitchen/ back porch/laundry room/pantry
Zone 3: Main bathroom/extra bedroom/ kid's rooms/ craft room
Zone 4: Master bedroom/bath/closet
Zone 5: Living room/den/TV room
This list works great for some kinds of houses; it doesn't work so great for mine. For one thing, with a three-floor townhouse it makes a lot more sense to stay on one floor at time per zone. For another thing, the dining room isn't actually a separate room from the living room, and treating it like it is doesn't make much sense. For a third thing, the master bedroom doesn't need all that much maintenance, so giving it a full week and giving the living room a half-week doesn't fit. So, naturally, I just rearranged the weeks to my liking:
Zone 1: Entrance (including front closet)/front porch/garage
Zone 2: Kitchen/refrigerator/pantry
Zone 3: Living room/dining room/second-floor hallways
Zone 4: Office (including closet)/laundry room/bathrooms/third-floor hallways
Zone 5: Master bedroom (including closet)
The other thing you'll note is that chores that come up on the daily or weekly routines don't come up here. I roomba the bedroom as part of the weekly routine, so I don't have it on this list. I declutter as part of the weekly routine, so I don't have it on the list.
So how do I use these lists? Well, every day I have a fifteen-minute 'zone cleaning' slot (for me, it's right after work). At that point, I flip the Control Journal open to my current zone and look at the zone cleaning list there, then set a timer for 15 minutes. I pick a task and do it until I'm done with it, or until the timer has gone off. (If the timer goes off mid-task, I just put away my cleaning materials and stop then.) When I'm done, I cross the task off the list. If the timer has not yet gone off, I pick another task and keep working until it does. Many tasks take less than a minute, so I can often zip through a big chunk of the cleaning list in one go. The next day, when I'm in the zone cleaning time again, I pick an un-crossed-off task and keep going. I probably won't get through all of the cleaning tasks for an area in a week... but I will get through a lot of them, and over the course of a couple of months I'll eventually hit everything. If I run out of tasks before I run out of week, then yay, I get extra free time the remaining days of that week.
A side note on decluttering: if a room is really cluttered, the general recommendation is that you should just spend your 15 minutes of zone cleaning every day decluttering that room (when you're in its zone, I mean) until it's less clutterful. This is because it is hard to, e.g., vacuum a floor that is covered in stuff, or dust a table that is covered in stuff. For me, a hybrid approach works best: the kitchen is largely decluttered, so I do ordinary 'zone cleaning' in it every day. The office, however, is still only half-decluttered, so I alternate: one day I declutter, the next day I do cleaning. Back when the office was thoroughly cluttered (in that way where I couldn't see the floor), there was no point trying to clean around the stuff, so I decluttered every day. Your mileage, as always, may vary.
On to the individual zones. Remember: you can rearrange these however you like! If you have no laundry room, for instance, by all means spend that time somewhere else. If your master bedroom does need a full week, give it one, and stick something else in the half-week spot. Etc. Similarly, if you go 'wtf is with wiping down the front door? who cares if the front door is dusty?', then, well, don't put it on your list! Simple.
Zone One: Front porch/entrance (including closet)/garage
Front Porch (Exterior)
- Wipe down the outside of the front door with a damp cloth.
- Clean any cobwebs from around the doorframe and dust it.
- Shake out the welcome mat. Bang on it a few times if it looks particularly grotty.
- Sweep the concrete in front of the house, just to pick up the worst of the dirt/twigs/dead leaves.
- Use glass cleaner to clean the window in the front door.
Entryway (including closet) (Interior)
- Dust the inside of the door, and the interior garage door.
- Clean any cobwebs from the inside of the front door, the interior garage door, and the closet door. Dust the doorframes and light fixtures.
- Retrieve any mail that's been hanging around and sort it.
- Throw away junk mail, old newspapers and other paper clutter.
- Wipe any fingerprints/smudges from the walls/switchplates.
- Straighten the coat closet. (Line up shoes, make sure everything is on a hanger, put gloves/hats/scarves on the top shelf.)
- Sweep the floor to pick up any large trash, and then run the roomba.
- Sweep the stairs leading up, and run the roomba on the landings.
Garage
Note: Most garage cleaning is not my purview; it's
jmpava's. That's why the "Garage" list is so very, very short. If I were responsible for more garage tasks, there'd be more garage tasks on the list.- Find anything that was taken out of the car but not put where it belongs in the house, and put it away.
- Update the chest freezer inventory list.
- Rescue anything from the chest freezer that is about to die the death of terminal freezerburn, and move it to the upstairs freezer so you remember to use it first.
- Wipe down the chest freezer.
Zone Two: Kitchen/refrigerator/pantry
Kitchen/Refrigerator
- Empty refrigerator, clean thoroughly (including wiping down shelves), check expiration dates, and restock. (This is different from the twice-weekly 'clean fridge' because for that I just pitch out things that are obvious bad: elderly leftovers, inedible vegetables, expired yogurt, etc. For this, I pull everything out, wipe down, and actually check the expiration on things like condiments.)
- Clean freezer. Triage long-term frozen items to chest freezer. Earmark anything that needs to be used up before it freezerburns to death.
- Clean microwave, inside and out, including window-cleaning the door and removing the interior spinny tray to wash it and clean under it.
- Clean stovetop, including washing burners.
- Run oven clean cycle. (I don't do this every month. Basically, if the oven looks grotty -- like, if I've cooked something that left grease spatters -- I run it; if it looks okay, I don't bother. Especially in summer, when four hours of concentrated heat is intolerable.)
- Wipe down the counters, including moving small appliances/canisters/etc. to get under them.
- Wipe down small appliances/cannisters.
- Straighten drawers and cupboards. Find homes for things that were just jammed in there somewhere when I got them.
- Thoroughly clean and scrub the sink.
- Window-clean the window behind the sink.
- Wipe fingerprints/smudges/etc. off walls and cupboards and switchplates.
- Dust the tops of cupboards, and doorframes, and light fixtures, and remove any cobwebs.
- Clean under sink. Throw away any trash that wound up under there.
- Clean the recycling and compostable cupboards and throw away any trash that fell out of those bins.
- Wash out cats' water bowl.
- Sweep and scrub kitchen floor.
Pantry
I do this one shelf at a time, from most-relevant (baking goods shelf, which gets really messy really fast because flour tends to get everywhere) to least-relevant (canned items, which last forever and don't spill).
- Remove items from pantry and wipe down shelves.
- Purge anything that's expired or has otherwise gone bad.
- Move anything that doesn't belong to the shelf where it does belong.
- Check whether anything is getting low and needs to go on the shopping list.
Zone Three: Living room/dining room/second-floor hallways
Living room and dining room are essentially one room for me, so I lump them together.
- Dust tops of bookshelves, doorframes, windowsills, mantel. De-cobweb.
- Clean windows.
- Straighten up bookcases.
- Dust knicknacks and things.
- Clear off end table and use window cleaner to polish. (All of my tables in the living-room/dining-room are glass-topped, hence 'window cleaner.')
- Clear off coffee table and use window cleaner to polish.
- Use a damp rag to wipe fingerprints/smudges from walls/switchplates.
- Purge old magazines and newspapers.
- Clean under cushions in the couch and return stray items to where they belong.
- Move furniture and run roomba under them. Return stray items to where they belong.
- Clear off dining room table and use window cleaner to polish.
- Surface-mop floors in dining-room/living-room.
- Clear off landing to upstairs. (This is a big one for me, as I have a bad habit of putting things on the landing to take upstairs and then... never actually taking them upstairs.)
- Sweep stairs and roomba landing.
Zone Four: Office (including closet)/laundry room/bathrooms/third-floor hallways
Office
- Clear off the desk, and sort/file/shred/whatever stray papers. (This is just my desk. I do not touch jmpava's desk, except to put things back on it when they fall on the floor. ;) )
- Purge pens/pencils/etc that no longer work, empty tape rolls, etc.
- Put all papers that need to be filed in a stack (scanning and filing is, also, jmpava's chore).
- Put all papers that need followup in a pending file for when I do paperwork.
- Straighten drawers.
- Turn off and dust computers/computer equipment.
- Wipe down monitors.
- Dust furniture.
- De-cobweb doorframes/windowsills/corners.
- Wipe down windowsills and clean windows.
- Use a damp rag to wipe fingerprints/smudges from walls/switchplates.
- Straighten up bookshelves.
- Check supplies to see if anything needs to go on the shopping list.
Laundry Room
- Wipe down the washer and dryer.
- Wipe the gunk (crusted-on detergent, mostly) from under the washer lid.
- Throw away empty bottles/boxes/packages/containers. (We seem to have a lot of these.)
- Clean lint trap. (We also do this after each load, theoretically, but it never hurts to check.)
- Sweep and then roomba the floor.
- Surface-mop the floor, or, if it's really grungy, scrub it.
- De-cobweb.
- Straighten and organize the cabinets. Wipe down any places where detergent etc. has spilled.
- Check for anything that's running low and put it on the shopping list.
- Wash the cats' water and food dishes.
- Use a damp rag to wipe fingerprints/smudges from walls/switchplates.
Bathrooms
- Wash bathmat.
- Sweep and surface-mop the floor, or, if it's really grungy, scrub it.
- Clear off the counter.
- Clean the counter and sink.
- Clean the bathtub and tub walls.
- Straighten the drawers.
- Purge empty bottles/containers/etc.
- Clean the mirror.
- Use a damp rag to wipe fingerprints/smudges from walls/switchplates.
Hallway
- Put things away where they go. (This, like the landing, is one of my bad-spots, places where things get dumped and then not put away for weeks and weeks.)
- Run the Roomba.
- Use a damp rag to wipe fingerprints/smudges from walls/switchplates.
- De-cobweb.
Zone Five: Master bedroom (including closet)
Bedroom
- Clear off bedside tables and the top of the dresser.
- De-cobweb.
- Use a damp rag to wipe fingerprints/smudges from walls/switchplates.
- Wash mattress pad and flip mattress.
- Wipe down windowsills and clean windows.
- Dust furniture.
Closet/Dresser
As with the office,
jmpava's clothes are his to organize, so I just shove them back onto his shelves if they start to encroach. ;)- Get rid of anything identified as no longer useful (doesn't fit, has a hole in it, hate it, whatever).
- Straighten shelves.
- Organize/tidy hanging clothes.
- Straighten dresser drawers.
- Put any stray dirty clothes in the hamper.
- Dust/de-cobweb.
- Roomba closet floor.
And that's it. Every day I do a morning and evening routine, fifteen minutes of day-of-the-week routine, and fifteen minutes of zone cleaning or decluttering. It... does not result in an immaculate house! But it results in a much better house than I would otherwise have.
If you have any other questions about how I do it, let me know.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Part III
Date: 2011-04-22 04:29 pm (UTC)I don't actually do the challenges or surprise challenges yet, but once things are more decluttered, I probably will.
Recently, I added something I call my "Hit List" to my daily plan (not exactly my "FlightPlan"-- which I have on a pretty piece of paper taped above my desk).
It's basically a lot of little things I've been meaning to do around the house-- most take 15 minutes or even substantially less. I am doing something from the list every day (it's just been two days, but still!)
For example, yesterday I washed my makeup brushes, which I hadn't done in a horrifyingly long time. Other items include things like putting up this paper towel/foil/ziploc bag holder I bought, since those items are still kind of cluttering the kitchen counter unnecessarily (consider how little space we have!) Just little things like that.
I've actually been amazed at how much clutter I've been able to get rid of already, considering how-- though I'm not "BO"-- I have gotten pretty good at periodically decluttering-- mainly out of necessity. Like I said, we've been married 13 years, and we have literally lived in, let's see... ~8 places in that time. We've moved so many times, we've HAD to get rid of stuff at least that often. Not to mention that our largest place ever was 1100 square feet, most of our marriage we've lived in less than 850, and our current place is the smallest yet. If I didn't get rid of at least some clothes every 3-6 months, for example, we'd never get in our closet. But even so... I managed to bag 3 shopping bags of clothes for donation the other day, and got rid of several trash bags worth of paper.
Anyway... I guess I'm saying that it wasn't too hard to get the spirit of FlyLady and modify it into something that seems to be working for me. It's INCREDIBLY important-- particularly given my ADD and the fact that I run my own business from home (two things that are rarely successfully mixed) that I do these little stupid tasks to get some "wins" in the morning and evening, so that I can create a little more structure in my life. And it's even more important as we are finally considering having a baby and I will have to go off my ADD meds, at least for a while. Yikes! I need all the non-pharma support I can get!
Part IV
Date: 2011-04-22 04:30 pm (UTC)And in and of itself, it could be... not that big a deal. BUT. We JUST had this huge discussion about my fear of being stuck with everything domestic after we have a baby (we won't even be trying to conceive for several more months, but just thinking ahead). Because as it turns out, studies show that even men who did half or almost half the housework before baby was born end up doing much less afterward AND don't do half the childcare AND that's true even if the woman works just as many hours outside the home AND STILL true even if she makes more money. So... You know. I am not having that.
I have to think about what I need to be on his "Flight Plan," because I know he is not philosophically opposed to housework AT ALL, but he's just not really doing it*. And I need it not to be one of those things where it's always in the back of my mind and I just end up handling it because it "feels like" my responsibility. You know-- like the way women are socialized to remember birthdays and buy cards and stuff.
So, we do have to work on that. For sure.
And though my husband is very progressive, he was brought up in a somewhat traditional household (much moreso than I was), and he even had a live-in maid/nanny. So I'm afraid that-- while it's FANTASTIC in a way, for both of us-- the fact that things never seem to get dirty around here, laundry magically appears folded in his drawer, etc... is perhaps a little too reminiscent of his childhood, and I don't want him to get comfortable with that, YK? Especially when he's totally intellectually willing to pull his own weight and he has actually pulled most of both our weights at many times in our marriage.
Okay-- enough for now! Sorry to go on, LOL... Like I said, I'm pretty excited about it all and it was nice to share it with someone. :)
*To be fair, he just started a new job ~2.5 weeks ago, but it's not a job with a tremendous learning curve, and he has time.