My system for cleaning the house

How I have never cleaned so little and my house has never been tidier

Since I had a baby in april my house has never been cleaner. And this is the secret to it: my family members do (almost) just as much as I do. My kids, my husband, our housemate. I never have to ask them for it, better even, they ask me. Yes, even my 5 year old. How did I accomplish this, you ask? I made a game out of it.

Ingredients:

• Know that your house will NEVER be TOTALLY done, and accept that.
• BINGO
• Ice cream

I made a bingo board that contains all, or most, of what I would like to get done in all the rooms in our house. Everything is on there (bathroom, vacuum, mopping, dishes, toys, books, …). I call it: Let’s take care of our house – bingo. The kids call it house cleaning – bingo. We have a bingo game with little balls in it and we draw numbers until everybody has a chore. Then we all do our chores. The little ones get help from the adults and learn to do the tasks they have never done before. When somebody is done with their job they see if somebody else can use some help. We don’t draw new numbers before everybody is done. We are a TEAM, people!
As soon as we hit a bingo, we stop. The jobs that didn’t get a hit don’t have to be done.
The game is completely voluntary. This is essential: if somebody doesn’t want to help they don’t have to. The downside is this: everybody who helps gets ice cream when we hit a bingo. No helping = no ice cream.

Little modifications I did over the 6 months we have been playing:

• I keep a list of all the chores and who did them on what day. If something consistently doesn’t come up, I try to go over it during the week. If the last two or three times a kid cleaned out the fridge, you know it’s going to need a deeper clean the next time an adult hits that number.
• Every five or six weeks we make a new board. Some chores leave the board and others are put on, sometimes we merge chores. For example: the microwave and the oven used to be two seperate chores, but now that they get cleaned out almost every week it’s an easy job, so whoever hits that number get do both relatively quickly. The terrace and the garden don’t really need to be done now that it is winter. And after cleaning out our cargo bike 4 times in five weeks we decided he didn’t have to be cleaned for the next two months…
• We merged vacuuming and mopping but put them twice on our card. It used to be very problematic if somebody hitted ‘mopping’ before the vacuumig got done. Essentially they had to vacuum ánd mop, which are both big tasks. Now, the first box that gets a hit, that person needs to vacuum. Only when we hit the second box as well, we mop.

Advantages

• My kids learn we are a team: we all help each other till all the jobs are done. So if you get an easy job, you help someone with a hard job afterwards.
• My kids learn to do different chores: my 5 year old had to clean the toilet for the first time last week and I took the time to show her how to do it step by step. Next time she hits that box, I can say to her: you remember how you had to do it, yes? Go for it, honey!
• I don’t have to do all the cleaning by default or nag my family to help.
• Because you get one job at a time, everybody is very motivated to do it very well. When you have to clean the entire kitchen, you usually start out motivated but that dwindles by the time you are at it for more than half an hour. But now you only have to clean the furnace or the fridge and then you can move on to the next job.
• We have ice cream once a week!