Oh, how I wish I had a cleaning lady! :)
I’m home with my kids right now, so I divide everything up and do different things each day. There’s bathroom day, when I clean everything in both bathrooms and switch out the towels for clean ones. Our bathroom stays decent for a week, but the kids’ bathroom needs an extra wipedown or two on other days (darn those little boys and their bad aim).
The living room is swept every few days, but dusted once a week. The kitchen is cleaned several times a day, after each time I cook. Dishes go straight into the dishwasher, pots and pans are cleaned right after each use. Counters and tables are wiped down, and the floor is swept once a day. I wipe down the cabinets and clean the fridge on an as-needed basis, usually when the fingerprints get to be too glaringly obvious.
Our bedroom is kept pretty neat, and dusted once a week, vacuumed as needed. The kids clean their own rooms whenever I can’t walk through them, and then I go behind them to dust and vacuum.
Mopping, oh how I hate it. This is one thing I always put off for far too long because with three kids running around all the time it seems like a waste of effort. I use an electric steam mop, which I really like. I also use it to clean the bathroom floors. The windows are cleaned on the inside every now and then. The basement is my husband’s domain, being his painting studio and office. I avoid it like the plague. The office is where we store clutter, and every few months my husband and I take a Saturday morning to clear it all out!
Laundry is one of those things that I sometimes slack off with. I’ll be on top of it for a while and do a load every day, then get busy with other things and have to catch up. It’s getting easier now that the kids are older and at least put their clean clothes away.
Our rabbit’s cage gets cleaned completely once a week, with his litter box being changed twice a week. Sometimes my daughter does it, and sometimes I do it. From fall through spring, I just dump his litter box in the garden so it can age and be fertilizer by the time I plant my veggies!
As for the cleaning products, I use Windex, Pledge, or Murphey’s Oil Soap for glass and wood, whatever kitchen cleaner or bathroom cleaner is on sale, and a Magic Eraser for counters and walls. A good old broom and dustpan for sweeping, and a vacuum cleaner that I’m pretty sure hates me. Either that or I need to find the manual and figure out how to clean/replace the filters. When I’m cleaning, I stick to the “top to bottom” rule, dusting and cleaning everything in that order and saving floors for last.
The clutter is the worst of it, but the kids clean up their own things and my husband and I try to weed out the worst of on a regular basis. No one will ever walk into our house and wonder if we have kids or not! It seems like so much typed out like this, but divided up over the course of the week, it means I have a lot of time to hang out with the kids and once they go to bed I can just relax and not feel like I have to do other things. When I worked full time, I’d spend hours each Saturday cleaning from one end of the house to the other. Bleah!