photo by Mandy_Jansen
Do you keep a home journal? Do you know what a home journal is? I recently started one. Like, over this last weekend. *smile* And since I am a person who loves lists, etc, it’s hard to believe that I’ve never had one before. In my striving to be more intentional in my home though, I thought that starting a home journal would be a good idea. And already, it is helping me to be more strategic in planning my days and planning out my schedule. As well as having a place to write down some long-term plans and goals for my home.
In case you don’t know what a home journal is, I will tell you… it is a place where you can write down anything and everything that is helpful to you in your job of care taking your house, in a way that makes sense to you. And it doesn’t even have to be in written in pen and paper form. If it makes more sense to you to make a journal online or on your computer, that’s great too. It can really be anything that you want! But the idea is to make a plan and be intentional about what your goals are. Then write them down all in one place where you can keep track of everything. These are some of the things that I’ve written down in my journal so far that are helping me to be intentional.
Every Room and Area of My House
Do you actually know how many rooms or areas you have in your house. Although, our house isn’t that large, when I actually made a list of each room and area of our house, I was surprised. I included in this, the entryway to our front door and deck, as well as the car(s) and the yard. I will tell you why I did this in a moment.
Every Room in My House Where Laundry Gathers
Probably you will have a hamper in each bedroom and perhaps each bathroom as well.
Specific Daily Cleaning Schedule
Now that I had all of my rooms and laundry written down, I then was able to see how many areas I need to clean in the course of a week. If you have a small house and/or just one or two kids, chances are that you would be able to have one cleaning day a week where you clean the whole house. And maybe even one laundry day for the whole week. In my case, with as many rooms as we have (even though our house isn’t large) and as much laundry as we have with 7 people living here, that isn’t realistic for me. Doing all the cleaning in one day would be an all day, exhausting job. And doing the entire amount of laundry all in one day, would keep me up doing laundry for 24 hours straight. So in my case, I need to break things down into manageable chunks for each day. Here’s what I do:
Monday Cleaning:
Master bedroom and stairway
Attic (maybe this seems strange- but the attic is where I keep my coupon stockpile and if I don’t keep up on it, bags and stuff tends to get thrown in there and piled up in front of the door… so I need to regularly put things away and organize everything.)
Living Room
Monday Laundry:
Master bedroom
Tuesday Cleaning:
Mudroom
Master bathroom
Tuesday Laundry:
Master bathroom
Wednesday Cleaning:
Main Bathroom
Laundry Room/Pantry
Hallway
Wednesday Laundry:
Main Bathroom
Thursday Cleaning:
Girls’ Bedroom
Kitchen
Thursday Laundry:
Girls’
Friday Cleaning:
Boys’ Bedroom (Now, the boys are definitely old enough to do this. However, I have not done a great job over the years about instructing them in the area of how to clean and what is involved in a clean room. So, over the next month, I plan on taking the time to instruct them, which means I will need to be heavily involved in the process.)
Dining Room
Entryway and Deck
Friday Laundry:
Boys’ bedroom
Saturday cleaning:
Car
Yard
Family room if needed
So, as you can see, each day of the week, I deep clean a few rooms or areas in my home. I broke them down according to location in the house and/or the difficulty level of each room. Monday through Friday, I also wash whatever laundry is associated with whichever room is being cleaned. Each bedroom cleaning day includes stripping the sheets off of the bed(s) and washing them as part of the laundry for that room.
Making a list of each room/area of my house and each laundry location helped me to make sure that throughout the week, every area was getting some attention and I wasn’t overlooking anything.
Establishing Morning and Evening Routines
This is a principal from Fly Lady. Each morning, there are several jobs that need done in order to make the day run more smoothly. Each evening there are also a series of things that I do (that I also am involving my family in) to get the house ready for the next day. If you are interested in seeing what these are, leave a comment and I can perhaps do a second post about those and more of a specific daily routine.
Projects
In my journal, I have a page for each room of my house. If there are certain items that I want/need to buy for that room (ie: new towels for the bathroom, etc). That way, I can work things little by little into the budget and/or see which items are the priority. Remember, it is your job to bring beauty into your home.
Deep Cleaning Instructions
I also have in the journal, instructions for what needs to happen in order for any given room to be clean. I did this mostly for the benefit of teaching these things to my children.
Other Ideas
Like I said, use your journal for whatever is helpful to you. Other ideas would be including meal plans or recipes, food costs, ideas on how to cut back on your budget… the list is endless!
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What a great way to keep track of things! Great ideas! We have a home journal too, only it’s of a different variety, it’s really more of a praise journal where our family keeps track of praises, blessings, and answered prayers. It’s so fun to monitor progress–to see how the things we worried about last month were fulfilled or cared for this month etc. I love to be able to keep track of God’s hand in our lives and smile and rejoice at all the ways that He has blessed us.
What a great idea Kathryn! Out of curiosity, how old are your kids and how long have you been doing this? I’ve thought about doing something similar, but writing prayers/praises on rocks and collecting them in a basket… but I never knew what to do with the basket of rocks! =)
I have a home journal! In it, I have anything I need to keep from getting lost, but I don’t need it right that second (we needed two W2s before we could file for our tax return, and we got one half-way through the month, so I stuck it in the pocket of my binder/home journal, right next to the picture of the desk I want.
), along with an ongoing list of things I’m grateful for, my to-do list, my menu plan (in a sheet protector), a shopping list, our budget, my reading list, my cleaning schedule (in a sheet protector), and then 5 dividers. I have been needing to buy another set of dividers because I have some stray papers I need sections for. In my dividers, I have recipes I want to try, some old menu plans, dates of my cycles (lol), blog ideas, preschool plans, prayer requests, goals for 2011 (financial, spiritual and family, and personal and health) and a list of phone numbers in case my phone gets lost or ruined. I also stick my notebook that I write my devotions in into my binder so it doesn’t get lost. I love having everything in one place! It makes life so much easier.
Alright Audrey, you get the “Overachiever-of-the-day” award.
Just kidding! =)
I don’t have a journal per se, but I do have a household reference binder, and I keep a journal of all the canning I do, price per lb. if I have to buy the ingredients, and number of jars and the date, so I know about when it’ll be time to process the next year. Yours is a great idea. I’d probably be way on top on things if I implemented it.