Coronavirus cleaning schedule

It's a Friday night, but we're all stuck inside, so what better time to write about cleaning?! With everyone home 24/7 and our homes serving as our offices, schools, restaurants, gyms, movie theaters, and maybe even dance studios and soccer fields, things are getting messy.

Many years back in 2013 when I was pregnant with our second child, I wrote about our decision to hire a cleaning service. They have consistently cleaned our home every other week since then -- every other week, until now. We will resume our cleaning service once this global pandemic declines and we are comfortable having other people in our house, but for now we are going to clean everything on our own. (And, though we decided to temporarily suspend our cleaning service, we are continuing to pay the ladies who run it so that we do not contribute to the shuttering of their small business.)

We are pampered by this cleaning service luxury, and though I've contemplated at times canceling the service because of the little voice that tells me "we should be able to handle this job ourselves," 15 days in our house without them has unequivocally proven that would be a bad idea.

We are getting the whole family involved with daily, weekly, and bi-weekly cleaning. Clearly, some of this stuff we will always do, global pandemic or not, but some of the bi-weekly chores are more difficult to achieve in the absence of extra help.

Here's the schedule we are attempting (all organized in a Google Sheet):

We are trying to use some time on Saturday mornings to recenter from the week. Last Saturday, I clearly never got to the showers nor to the dusting, so I'll try to tackle those tomorrow morning. Like everything right now, the goal is not perfection but rather holding ourselves accountable and motivating ourselves during a time when it's probably easy to let things slide. Honestly, if I vacuum and dust rather than spend an hour reading the news, that's going to be better for my house, my family, and my soul.

One small win the other week involved turning doorknob and light switch sanitizing into a little game for the kids. They had to work together to find all the doorknobs and light switches in the house, and then take turns giving each a little Lysol spray. They seemed (mostly) happy in the process, so I'll take it.