As the busy, working mother of two active little girls, I often don’t have the time to clean that I need. Sometimes I look around at my house and worry about when I’m going to get everything done. In the past, I have cleaned my home on Saturdays, but then I realized my entire Saturday was being lost to cleaning! Then, we had no time to spend together as a family.

Both of our kids are competitive dancers and one of them also plays sports. There are many nights when we are home late or not at home.

The solution? Create a cleaning routine that enabled me to do a little cleaning each night. I found a neat cleaning schedule on Little Green Notebook.

While this routine would work pretty well for us, there is no way that we could only do laundry on Saturdays. I had to tweak this a little to make it fit our needs. I came up with this:

Our only solution was to wash and dry clothes every day, using the timer. I wake up, throw a loud of “ironables” in the washer, and they wash while we are getting ready. We then hang these clothes up to dry before we leave the house. I then throw our “dryables” into the washer and set the timer so that the washer will start shortly before I get home. I then don’t have to worry about the dryer running with no one at home.

Washing and drying clothes every night also makes for smaller laundry loads, therefore, less to fold and iron.

This cleaning schedule also means that we can do a little cleaning each day and have a house that both feels and looks a lot cleaner. The best advice I can give you is to find an idea you like and tweak it to make it work for you.

Cleaning our house a little each night was the only way that would work for us. Plus, we have a lot more time to spend together on the weekends.

How do you manage your household cleaning?