A Family House Cleaning List

If you are looking for a house cleaning list, there may be some confusion in your household about who is supposed to clean what and when. If you have a spouse and children, but are still doing most of the household chores yourself, it's time to stop.

Start delegating - it's good for the kids and will make you less resentful of your spouse. There are actually several helpful checklists that you can use and schedules that you can hang in various places throughout the house. This is a daily checklist; things that can be done in just a few minutes on a daily basis to make weekly cleaning easier for everyone involved.

• After meals and snacks, every family member should rinse off their own dishes and put them in the dishwasher. Crumbs should be wiped off of kitchen counters. At the end of the day, the only thing that should be necessary is to add dish washing detergent and run the dishwasher.

• Trash cans may need to be emptied on a daily basis, depending on the number of people in your home. One or two people should be responsible for getting the trash to the curb on trash day.

• If you have several bathrooms in your home, keeping them clean should be the responsibility of the family members that use them. If your kids are not old enough to do the cleaning, let them help. If you teach them that cleaning is fun, they won't consider it a chore. Automatic shower cleansers can be a joy. You simply push a button after the last shower of the day and your shower stall is cleaned automatically. Everyone needs to clean up after themselves when they are using the toilet. Keep a toilet bowl brush (and cleanser) beside every toilet in the house.

• Preventing clutter is much easier than de-cluttering. Organization is the key to preventing clutter. Each child should have a basket or drawer to put their graded papers or projects in. There should be a basket for bills that need attention. Junk mail should go immediately in the trash. If you can, handle your mail only once.

Check your mail at the end of the day and pay any bill that came in that day. You can now pay most utility and other bills online. Consider going paperless. Many companies will send your bill to your e-mail address rather than to your mailbox. This further reduces clutter, as well as trash.

• Toys, videos and other items in the family room should be picked up and put away before everyone goes to bed at night. If you start these habits when the kids are young, they'll never fuss about doing it.

Hopefully, this house cleaning list will help take some of the burden off of the major cleaners in your home. Everyone can pitch in on the weekly cleaning, too. If everyone helps, no one has to spend their whole day off cleaning the house.

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