Resolutions: Home Management

This one is an easy one because it’s really only a tweaking of our basic household routines. We need to tweak them each year based on the children and their changing schedules and ages. My oldest girl being 21 is super busy with school and work. She also volunteers at the hospital once a week so we have been phasing her out of our daily routines because she’s rarely home. My second girl is 18 and she has a job now, singing rehearsals for their Sola Gratia group and rehearsals for a role in an upcoming children’s show. Another busy girl! My oldest son is still mostly at home but he’s handling more of the  outdoor and animal chores and not so many of the indoor chores. That leaves four children that are consistently home and available. And, two of them make work instead of doing work.

How do we handle our household management? We have a schedule of chores to be done by everyone. We divide up the rooms in our home and have categories for those rooms. For example, the living room is picked up twice a day. Once a week it gets what I like to call a “scrub down” where we dust and vacuum and fish legos out from under the sofa. We tackle laundry every day and the kitchen gets a “scrub down” three times a day with one day a week being devoted to cleaning out the fridge and a full ‘hands and knees’ mopping.

Of course, this is what is on paper but is no indication of what happens every day. Let’s just say our schedule is the ideal and we rarely hit the ideal. But, that’s OK with me. I can live with that because I like to set lofty goals and strive to hit them.

One of the biggest sources of inspiration for me is the book Large Family Logistics. If you haven’t read it, you should. Even though I only have a medium-sized family (Ha!), I love this book and her blog. I used a lot of her advice and divided up my weeks into Kitchen Day, Office Day, Errand Day and the like. It really did help me get more done because if I have a designated Errand Day, I am much more likely to get those library books returned on time. Or only go grocery shopping once a week. Or actually get to cleaning out a kitchen cabinet or two. When it’s on the calendar I’m much more likely to actually DO that thing, because I am obsessed with enjoy checking things off a list. It’s a blessing and a curse.

The only changes I’ve made to my home management plan this year is to phase out some of the older working children and phase in some of the younger, now more capable, children.

A good detailed daily routine and lists of home management tasks helps get me going in the right direction even if I don’t always get there some days. When you aim for nothing, that’s what you’ll hit every time.

Other posts in this series:

Jubilant January!
Resolutions: Spiritual Growth
Resolutions: Health and Fitness
Resolutions: Personal Motivation
Resolutions: Finances

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