Monday Cleaning Schedule for Working Moms: This is Everything I Clean Before Work on Mondays!

My Monday cleaning schedule for working moms! This is everything I clean before work on Mondays!

You can watch the video above for a real time clean with me, and I’ll be your body double/cleaning bestie. BUT if you are more of a reader and just want a list of what to clean today, I’ve got you! I’ll detail everything I do down to what load of laundry I wash, and what settings I use! Let’s get into it! (Hint! If you’d like a printable checklist of this cleaning routine, you can find that here!)

The first thing I do every morning, is I air all the beds. This has been shown to help with allergies by preventing dust mites! It’s a vintage hack that many here in America have forgotten about, but is still common practice in many parts of the world! Here’s how you do it:

1. Crack or open the windows in your room.
2. Pull back the layers of your bedding one by one, and use your pillow to beat away any dirt or debris or dead skin that may have accumulated.
3. Place your pillows and your pajamas by the window to air as well.
4. After 15 minutes have passed, you can come back in and make your bed if you wish! I will sometimes just fold back all the layers neatly in step 2, and leave them be!

I know this seems like kind of a weird or controversial step…I mean a cleaning routine that doesn’t tell you to MAKE your bed, and just tells you to pull back all the covers? I mean who does that? I do, my darling readers. I do. And trust me, it works! Plus you can just fling your covers back as you get out of bed in the AM and it saved you time!

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The next thing I do is put a load of laundry in the wash. Because let’s be so for real right now, laundry is one of the biggest banes of a working mom’s existence. Am I right, or am I right? On Mondays I wash lights and whites! I have a whole post on my laundry routine here, with what loads I wash on each day and what settings I use. If you’d like to check that out here’s the link! But for now, we’ll just talk about Monday! I use laundry tags on all my laundry bins that tell the washer what load of laundry is in that bin, what day you should wash it on, and what settings to use. This way if I need to delegate this task, it’s easy and doesn’t take any explaining or extra work! If you’d like to check those out, click here!

Mondays: Whites + Lights

Settings: White and lights are best washed in hot water with a ‘whiten and brighten’ boost and fabric softener, then dried on low heat. I’m super sensitive to chemical/store bought detergents and boosts so I like to use my own non-toxic hacks for this instead. You can check out my post on non-toxic laundry hacks here, if you feel the same!

You can either put them in the dryer (or hang dry if that’s more your thing) before work, OR if you worry about having a dryer running you can simply open the lid of the washing machine (Martha Steward taught me this hack) and then dry them when you get home.

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Next, it’s time to unload the dishwasher! For quite a while, I didn’t have a dishwasher, but the gist of this step remains the same! Dishes are washed before bed, and then put away in the mornings. Personally, I have found the dishes to be my biggest problem area in the house!

Many cleaning routines I’ve seen don’t explicitly build dishes into the chores, and those were the ones that wouldn’t work for me. I NEED to have dishes as a priority in my day, or the house is mayhem! Who jinxed adulthood to mean constantly either cooking, cleaning the kitchen, or doing dishes, then repeating the process? I just want to talk…

Alright, next I set a timer and clear the clutter in the house! I try to get as much done as I possibly can in the shortest amount of time! Most mornings I just set the timer for 5 minutes. Assuming I tidied up before bed with my PM cleaning routine, there isn’t a TON today which saves time before work as well. Anyways, here are some of my FAVE hacks for clearing the clutter.

1. Loop the waistband of your apron through a grocery sack to pick up trash as you go around the house! OR you can grab a big trash bag and just go around the house picking up TRASH ONLY before you move onto clutter, but I tend to get distracted if I do that sometimes!
2. Use a basket or rolling cart to pick up all the things that don’t belong in a room! If it belongs in the same room, I will pick up the item and put it where it goes. If it belongs in another room, I will put it in the basket I carry with me. This way I won’t get distracted from the room I’m cleaning/what I’m doing! Plus, this way as I move from room o room, I can put things where they go.

I mean…any time I can save a little effort I’m going to. While grandma might not approve, I’m a BIG fan of lazy girl cleaning. Meaning progress not perfection, and saving all the energy I can so I don’t give up and go binge Gilmore Girls with a bag of potatoes chips and a glass of wine.

Insert actual photo proof of me doing just that here… 😛

I have assigned cleaning tasks for each day of the week (if you’d like to see what each day is, you can read my post on my weekly cleaning tasks here), Mondays is 15 minutes of deep cleaning or decluttering in that weeks zones. (More on my zone system here.)

I don’t know about you, but with a raging addiction to iced coffee and T.J. Maxx/Homegoods, while I TRY my best to keep things decluttered and tidy in my house….I need to declutter a few times a year. I know that totally makes me sound like I’m constantly buying and getting rid of crap, but I DO try to be mindful and just buy things that bring me joy. I’m still a bit of a newlywed, so we’re working on setting up house still.

Anywho, the point of all that is to say I switch off between deep cleaning and decluttering when it’s zone time! I do deep cleaning most of the months, and then a few times a year with the changing of the seasons, I do some decluttering! I love timing it with the seasons, because that’s usually when I need to switch out the clothes in my closet, and put last season’s clothes in storage. I don’t exactly have strict wardrobes for each of the FOUR seasons, but I do switch things out twice a year based on if it is HOT or COLD.

After Work/Evening Cleaning

My evening cleaning stays the same every day of the week (you can get all the deets on my evening cleaning routine here), but basically after dinner I just clean up the clutter in the house for 10 minutes, start the dishwasher/wash dishes, put away the laundry from that morning’s washing, spot clean the floors in the high traffic areas of the house (entrance, kitchen, maybe living room), and then give myself a little *self care moment* by doing some skin care or a nice shower! They say you should take a 20 minute walk after dinner, but I feel like spending 30 minutes on these tasks gets me even more of a workout, AND I get to enjoy a clean house while I relax for the night. It’s a win all around.

And that’s everything I clean on Mondays!

Like I said at the beginning, I do ALL of this while listening to my Domestic Daydreams Radio cleaning routines that guide me through each step while playing Vintage radio shows from the 1940s-50s. If you’d like to get some free episodes to clean along to click here!

What the heck is that you might be asking? I’ll tell you. 

My Secret to Getting my cleaning schedule done in just 30 minutes? Podcast Cleaning Routines!

I found out I had ADHD, and all of a sudden it made TOTAL sense why “habits” never stuck, and I always felt like I was DROWNING in housework. I needed a tool that would 1. help me keep a routine 2. be a routine I could ACTUALLY do as a working homemaker. I finally started using audio morning cleaning routines ft. 1950s radio shows like Dragnet! I press play before work, it guides me through a routine in 30 minutes, and after work I have a clean house!

📻With my Domestic Daydreams Audio Morning Cleaning Routine I’ve combined the nostalgic 1950s Dragnet! True Crime Radio Show and transformed it into an audio guided daily morning cleaning routine that will guide you through

• ✅daily,
• ✅weekly, (like cleaning the bathroom on Tuesdays!)
• ✅monthly cleaning tasks in just
• ✅30 minutes a day.

I needed something that all I had to do was JUST PRESS PLAY every morning to get me started , and by the end of it I had a clean house. THIS is it!

And it means…

• ❌NO having to drag around & keep track of a timer
• ❌NO having to decide what your next cleaning task is- I guide you through it!
• ❌NO decision fatigue over what load of laundry to put in the washer, I tell you what’s assigned for the day AND EVEN what the proper settings are for your machine!
• ❌NO getting side tracked and frustrated! Our audio brings you right back to your task at hand. 

🚨I’m giving EVERYONE who wants one a FREE mp3 download of the routine! Just click here!