Quick Daily Cleaning Routine for Busy Parents

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As a parent, it’s hard to keep up with everything, especially a daily cleaning routine. Kids take a lot of energy and they make our lives busy or even a little crazy. When you’re in the middle of a busy day it’s hard to keep in mind that you still probably have a cleaning routine for your home that should be taken into account.

Cleaning is not everyone’s favorite task, and sometimes ignoring the daily cleaning routine seems preferable. You don’t always have the energy to think about cleaning at the end of the day and even convincing the kids to clean with you feels like too much.

The good news is that having a home cleaning routine doesn’t have to take hours. It is possible to have a quick cleaning routine that fits your busy life as a parent. I didn’t believe it either, but after trying several methods I’ve found a cleaning routine that works.

I’m happy to introduce you to a new guest post contributor. 

I’m Ashley, and I currently work for MSS Cleaning. I’ve been a mom for much longer than I’ve been learning about carpet cleaning so not all of my experience comes from what I do on the job. Sometimes though, it is handy to have some tricks up my sleeve from the pros themselves.

Daily Cleaning Routine

Cleaning your home doesn’t have to take forever, especially if you break it down into small daily tasks. Once I realized keeping my home clean was MUCH easier than cleaning up a home I’d let stay dirty a few days too long, I worked pretty hard to develop a routine that worked.

Use a Catch-All Bin

I didn’t think this would make much of a difference in my cleaning routine at first. It seemed counterintuitive to invite my family to place things in the wrong spot. I decided to give it a chance and put a cute bin in a high traffic area of our home just to see what might happen.

As it turned out, it was like night and day. Instead of a nightly battle of shoes, bookbags, mail, and other odds and ends, I had a neatly contained mess. After I realized how much less stressed I felt at the end of the day with a contained mess I saw the genius behind this cleaning trick.

On cleaning day everything in “the bin” is looked through and put away properly. I don’t have an area of my home that looks cluttered no matter how many times I pick it up during the day, and everyone knows when they’re expected to put their bin items away. It takes a bit of time to establish this as a regular weekly thing, but it’s totally worth the effort.

Bonus – If someone drops by unexpectedly, it’s easy to grab the bin and quickly hide it away in a closet.

How Do You Get Into A Cleaning Routine

Use a Cleaning App

There are apps for everything under the sun at this point in time. Cleaning your home is one of those things. If your kids are anything like mine, they love their technology and probably aren’t as motivated by a chore sticker chart as we would’ve been at their age. 

This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. If you look through the app store for cleaning routine apps, you’ll find a goldmine. There are apps that let you share a list with your whole family and most of those apps even send reminders to the specific person in charge of that chore.

The one we use is called “Our Home” and it has a shared list, a rewards/points system for kids to complete chores, and even a grocery list everyone can contribute to. When I updated from trying a written out chore list to using an app it made a dramatic difference in when things got done.

It also saves me some sanity because I’m not spending energy reminding the kids (or other people in the house) it’s time to clean. That’s more than worth the few minutes it takes to set up the list on the app, trust me.

If you prefer to go old-school, you can download these free printable cleaning checklists”

• House Cleaning Checklist for 10 Areas You Always Forget
• Rental Move-Out Cleaning Checklist
• House Cleaning Checklist for the 10 Minutes Before Guests Arrive
• Move-In Cleaning Checklist
• Cleaning Supplies Checklist

Have a Spill Kit

Carpet takes a ton of abuse in a family. Pets, kids, spills, you name it, it happens to your carpet. Even if you try to maintain your carpets regularly spills are still going to happen. When they do, I’ve found it’s best to have a kit on hand and ready to grab.

I created a cleaning caddy with a shower caddy and filled it with:

• Dish soap for grease stains or spills (think work boots walking on your clean carpet)
• Vinegar
• Baking soda
• Soft towels that I don’t mind getting dirty
• Club soda – great for fresh spills that you know will leave a stain if you don’t treat it right away.

All of these things can be used to get out spills. 

How to Clean Up a Spill on Carpet

You can soak up the stain with a towel in your kit. Make sure you blot (not scrub) going from the outside of the spill towards the middle. Then soak the spill in club soda, which will bubble and lift the fresh stain from your carpet. Blot up the club soda again to make sure the carpet is dry.

If you have a stain you didn’t get to right away you’ll need to break out the baking soda and vinegar. You can mix the two over a stain that’s set in and let the bubbling reaction work through the stain to loosen it.  You can also mix the baking soda and vinegar with water in a spray bottle and spray it onto the stain if you prefer to do the mixing yourself.

Once that’s done, leave it about 20 minutes, you can soak up the extra liquid with your towels. Then place a dry towel directly over the stain. Use a warm iron (hot irons may burn your carpet) and put that on the towel. The stain should lift up into your towel and out of your carpet. Pet owners say this works really well for pet-related stains that they’ve all but given up hope on.

Create a Cleaning Schedule, But Be Flexible

I do have a daily schedule for cleaning. Mondays are floor days for example. I know on Mondays I’m going to be paying extra attention to my carpets, my kitchen floor will get mopped, and I’ll make sure the bedrooms get vacuumed as well.

If you have little ones, be sure to schedule routine cleaning of their toys and items and be sure you know how to clean a playpen.

There are set days for specific parts of my cleaning routine. The big things that no one really wants to do like carpets, the bathroom, or a deep clean in the kitchen – all of those have their set day. The rest of the cleaning routine I use is more flexible and based on each day’s needs.

Every day, for instance, everyone makes sure they’ve picked up anything that’s been played with that day. It can go in the catch-all bin if they want, but it needs to be off the carpet. If there is a mess of shoes by the door they need to go into the shoe holder by the door, or into someone’s room. No one is allowed to have more than one pair of shoes by the door at a time.

Staying organized is key to keeping your house clean. If there were tasks assigned in the cleaning app they need to be completed before bedtime. It’s all part of a bigger picture of keeping things clean and making sure they stay that way.

Sometimes I have to adjust things based on the day and what’s going on. Mondays might be floor days, but if someone spills Kool-Aid all over the floor on Wednesday I can’t wait until Monday to clean it. This is where the flexibility comes in and my cleaning day may need to be moved in this week’s cleaning routine. 

I keep in mind that if there’s a sudden big mess the world isn’t going to end if I have to move the home cleaning schedule around.  I’ve found the most important part of the quick cleaning routine is really the daily clean up. When everyone is doing small cleaning tasks daily, it prevents you from having to tackle large tasks every week. Your home stays cleaner and everyone feels much better in the end.

If you invest a little more time figuring out the cleaning routine that works for you, it will eventually save you a lot of time overall. Your home is going to stay clean and you can spend more time on the things you want to.

More Cleaning Tips

• Cleaning Granite Counters
• How to Care for Stone and Granite
• Natural Way to Clean a Utility Sink

Find all my best cleaning tips and hacks in the table below. You can scroll though the table and look for ideas or search for specific ideas with the magnifying glass in the upper right-hand corner (on desktop). Click on the topic and then click through the specific article.