house cleaning chart - Stuff Parents Need

Do you struggle to keep your house clean? It can be so hard to balance daily cleaning tasks, especially when you have young children at home. Cleaning is never fun and, as a parent, I’d rather be playing with my daughter than cleaning the house. Unfortunately, things eventually start piling up until the household chores become overwhelming.

As some of you may remember, last year I found a great resource for tips on maintaining a clean home. For the past year we have been using the schedule that we put together using the step-by-step guide found at I Dream of Clean. Christine has put together a great book called Create Your Perfect Cleaning Schedule which contains a master list of almost every imaginable household chore along with tips to complete them faster. She also includes calendar templates along with a guide to creating a plan that is tailor made for your family. The book is short – a quick, easy read. I was very impressed with this book, and I highly recommend it for anyone who has a hard time keeping things organized around the house! Take a look at my blog post from last year to read my thoughts on the book.

If Create Your Perfect Cleaning Schedule sounds like something that would be a good fit for your family, I have some great news for you. From January 1-7, 2012, the Create Your Perfect Cleaning Schedule ebook will be 50% off!!! Just stop by I Dream of Clean and use the Promo Code: CleanNewYear2012. At a price this low, you’ve got no excuse not to work on that New Years’ resolution to keep your house clean!

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.

I’ve been reading the blog i Dream of Clean for several months now, and I have to say that I find it to be a breath of fresh air. There are many organization blogs out there, and frankly, I find that so many of them just make me feel bad! That could be my own issue, but so often the images they show are of homes ready for a magazine shoot. That is just not ever going to be my home. I also think that the organization ideas they propose are so complicated that they only seem achievable if you don’t need to do anything else, at all, for the next week. I need ideas that are quick and effective so that I can get a lot of mileage out of the time I put into projects. Basically, I need a cleaning schedule for working moms.

Christine is the brains behind the very inspiring blog i Dream of Clean. She offers user-friendly tips to help you conquer clutter and bring a bit of order to your chaotic life. I was absolutely tickled when I saw that she created a new e-book called Creating Your Perfect Cleaning Schedule, just in time for the new year and for folks who are wanting to make some positive changes in the way they run their households. Sign me up, Christine!

Creating Your Perfect Cleaning Schedule is very easy to digest, and I love that! Christine does offer a list of pretty much every household task you can think of, and even makes suggestions for what should be done daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually. Of course, she encourages you to customize the schedule to your liking and personal needs (for example: as much as it might need it, our bathrooms just aren’t getting cleaned more than once a week. Sorry!). Several of the tasks listed in the book are even hyper-linked back to posts that Christine has written about how to tackle that specific chore.That’s super helpful for folks like me who weren’t ever taught how to clean in an efficient and effective way.

Now, I’m gonna tell you the truth, here. Putting together a cleaning schedule that really and truly works for your family is not going to be effortless. You are going to need to spend some time really thinking about it, and also thinking about how your household management needs tie into everything else you are committed to doing on a daily and weekly basis. I have found that if I put together a cleaning schedule without thinking about what else is happening in our lives, I’ve just set us up for failure. So I’ve been slowly working on putting together a specific plan for every day of the week that makes the most sense for us, and I also have a running list of less frequent tasks that we can accomplish (usually 2 each week). Creating Your Perfect Cleaning Schedule really has empowered me to roll my sleeves up and get to work. Having guidance from Christine has given me the head start I needed, while her book also helped me realize that there is no such thing as a magic plan made by someone else that I can just plug into my own life.

As I slowly map out objectives for each day of the week in my home, I am feeling more and more confident that I’m creating a plan that will truly work. This is just one more way that positive change is coming to our family this year. As the household manager, I’m setting myself up for success by creating a schedule that makes sense and allows me to work smarter, not harder.

Buy it! Creating Your Perfect Cleaning Schedule is available for just $7.99, and is SOOOO worth the money. Let Christine help you create a system that works for you and your house today! IF YOU BUY THIS AND THEN WIN, YOUR MONEY WILL BE REFUNDED!

Win it!: One lucky Stuff Parents Need reader will snag this helpful e-book! The contest will run until January 29th at 11:59pm EST when a winner will be selected using Random.org. The winner will have 48 hours to respond to winning notification before the prize is forfeited and a new winner is selected. Open to residents of the United States. Limit one entrant per household, please.

Mandatory entry: First, “like” i Dream of Clean on Facebook, then come back here and let me know you did!

Additional entries:
1. Sponsor love: Subscribe to i Dream of Clean by email or RSS (you will love it!)
2. Blogger love: Follow Stuff Parents Need by Google Friend Connect

Be sure to enter my other current giveaways, found on the sidebar of my homepage.

Disclosure: I received a complimentary product for review purposes. All opinions expressed here are strictly my own. This post contains affiliate links.