Cleaning the bathrooms with a "Swish and Swipe"

Each Monday I will submit a post for my weekly goals.  I love seeing laid out in front of me what I am wanting to accomplish each week.  At the beginning of each week I always list my home blessing routine as my first item.  This is a list of items I do each week to keep my home in tip top shape.  The catch is that I only spend about 10 minutes per task.  I do one or two in the morning before work and same in the afternoon.  I usually have my house spic and span by Wednesday morning and never have to spend hours upon hours cleaning on Saturdays.  My WBH is as follows:

• Sweep / Mop
• Bathmats (just throw in washer)
• Change / Wash sheets
• Clean Scooby's bowls
• Clean Microwave
• Dust 
• Vacuum

A couple of the things you will may notice are missing are taking out the trash and the bathrooms.  The trash is very easy, Caleb and Brad both do that for me.  I am so spoiled by my boys.  Caleb has had chores since he was about 4 years old and one of them has always been to take out the trash bags from the bathroom / bedroom trash cans.  These are the little 4 gallon trash cans so they don't hold much and are easy for him to grab and throw in  our large trash can.  Brad will keep the large trash can empty for us, and I couldn't be more grateful for this.  It wasn't always like this in our house though, but that is for another post.  

Now, to my actual reasoning for my blog post.  The bathrooms..... they are a bit different.  I actually clean these on a daily basis.  Before you get too alarmed, it only takes me 2 minutes per bathroom (we have 3 bathrooms) to do this.  So in 6 minutes each day I have sparkling bathrooms that never smell or ever have to be harshly scrubbed on hands and knees.  You can always come into my house and have a clean toilet to rest your tush on and I enjoy the feeling of knowing that my family has a clean and sanitary place to "go".  But how do I do this?  I do what the Flylady calls "Swish and Swipe".  

What I do is, after my shower, I will take some cleaner  (one that can be used on glass / mirrors) and spray down the sink / vanity, mirror and toilet.  Next I squirt a little toilet cleaner in the toilet bowl and then take shower cleaner and spray down the shower.  I grab a wash rag and wipe the sink, mirror and toilet.  Next I take my toilet brush and swish it around to clean the inside bowl.  After wards I will turn on my shower and wash out all of the shower cleaner.  I will go and do this to Brad and Caleb's bathroom not too long after mine.  I keep these three cleaners, plus rags in each bathroom so I am not running around the house looking for each cleaner.  If I have to go chase down cleaning products, I will probably never get it done.  Another life changing thing for me was that I had the shower heads that can detach and be held on with a hose installed in each bathroom.  This allows me to spray the entire shower and tubs clean after they have been soaped up.  

Doing my daily swish and swipe gives me the gift of not having to worry about how clean my bathroom is plus, I don't have to scrub the tubs or tile, nor do I get that black crud that forms under the lip of the toilet bowl.  I am always able to check the toilet paper rolls while in the bathrooms so I don't run out of toilet paper and grab any clothes or towels that may have been left to take to the laundry room.  I enjoy knowing that in 6 minutes I can breathe a sigh of relief in having a sparkly bathroom and that feeling is un-measurable.   

My Home Blessing Routine

It's no surprise to anyone about my love for the FlyLady System.  I have and will continue to rave about how much it has helped me to transform my life.  Each week on Mondays I post my weekly goals and the very first entry on each post is to do my weekly home blessing.  I wanted to tell you what this is and exactly what this consist of for our home and how it differs from Flylady's.

Flylady's Weekly Home Blessing consist of  7 items that you are challenged to spend 10 minutes on each item and then stop.  This is typically done on Mondays.

• Vacuum
• Dust
• Quick Mop
• Polish Doors / Mirrors
• Throw out magazines / papers / catalogs
• Change Sheets
• Empty Trash

The reasoning for this part of the system is to get the main parts of our home blessed (cleaned).  You don't spend thirty minutes dusting nick nacks or hand scrubbing floors.  You go as simply as fast as possible and stop after the timer goes off.  In the beginning it is hard to get these items done in the 10 minute time frame and that mostly is because we are trying to do it "perfectly" and that can cause us some distress.  It took me years to get passed this feeling.  I still experience it sometimes, even years after doing my WHB like this, so I will look around my house and see how nice it looks and that feeling just fades away.

Now, my WHB is a bit different.  My list is as follows:

• Sweep / Mop
• Bathmats
• Change Sheets
• Dust
• Vacuum
• Scooby's Bowls
• Microwave

First thing is that I have a few different items on my list.  You don't see the magazines because I don't keep things like that at home so I have nothing the throw out.  Next up you don't see the trash cans and that's not because we don't empty them, its because my boys take care of that for me.  Caleb will gather all of the trash bags in the bathrooms and bedrooms and throw them in the large trash in the kitchen and then Brad takes it all out to the street for pickup.  I am so lucky to have my best boys!! :) Next up I don't have doors and mirrors to polish either.  We have windows on the exterior doors to our house but those get cleaned during my zone work and my mirrors are all in the bathroom where I clean them each day during my swish and swipe (that's for another post).  What I do have are to clean the bathmats and that is just throwing them in the washer and then the drier.  I do this because I like to keep them nice and white.  I also have Scooby's bowls and wiping the inside of the microwave.  These both take mere seconds to do.  I wills spray the inside of the microwave and leave it while I take the dog bowls and wash them and dry them and then take the drying rag and wipe the cleaner from the microwave.  I do these two things because I hate having a dirty microwave and when a pet peeve can be taken care of in less than 30 seconds, then why not? And Scooby's bowls are because one time per week he gets coconut oil drizzled on his food to keep his skin and coat healthy and shiny but it can leave a little film inside the bowl.  Plus when his bowls are clean it makes me feel better knowing that he's eating and drinking out of clean dishes too, which I feel is important for my dog.  

Now for the timing.  I don't do this all in one day or one hour (actually it might get done in an hour combined, I have never timed it).  I am a work outside of the home mom and it is hard to find that complete hour in one evening.  So I will break it up and do different items on different days.  The sheets get done Monday morning when we all make our beds and they, along with the bathmats, will be put in the washer and set to a delayed time so they will be just finishing up washing when I get home.  I do my sweeping and mopping in the afternoons usually while Caleb is doing his homework at the kitchen table on Mondays (I like to get this done first because I am not a fan of sweeping and mopping, you know the saying "eat frog first").  On Tuesdays I will dust in the morning before work and vacuum when I get home.  Tuesday's are the days that Scooby gets his bath and he is rewarded with his coconut oil dinner afterwards.  This makes it ready for me to clean on Wednesday morning along with wiping out the microwave all while waiting on my coffee to brew.   Each task on my WBH will always take less than 15 minutes to do.  Actually most of them only take about 5-10 minutes each.  So I am sure that I keep within my 1 hour combined.

A couple things you might not notice on my list are the bathroom sinks, toilets and showers.  I will cover this in another post, but for now you can just know that all three of the bathrooms get cleaned daily, including the toilets and showers.  It takes me 2 minutes per bathroom to complete and I never have to scrub the tub or toilets.  :)

This is how I complete my weekly home blessing routine.  I have heard many times from skeptics about the Flylady system not being for working moms and only tailoring to stay at home moms, but I am living, breathing, walking proof that it's not true.  Once you get it set to your life and circumstance then you will see just how well it can work out no matter what you are.  

I hope this gives you a little insight as to how I go about my home blessing per week.  If you have any questions, you can leave me a comment or send me an email.  If you have any tips or tricks you would like to share, I am all ears and ready to listen.

Until next time, take care.

-Kim

   

Flylady Tips from a Veteran Flybaby

I am an avid Flylady follower, going on 10 years now, and will probably always be.  After a decade of being with Flylady and her system, I have seen flybabies come and go and then come back again.  To be quite frank, I had left the system at one time and then a couple months later realized just how important my routines were to my life and came back in the nick of time.

I hate to see others fail at the system, or get frustrated by their outcomes because I know from experience that it can and does work for anyone.  After seeing different reviews and instagram comments that weren't so positive, I realized that maybe some flybabies need a few tips or maybe just a different person's perspective to help them get off the ground so they may fly also.  So I decided to put together a list of my own "Flylady Hacks" to help you from feeling flustered and instead help you to fly high!!

By the way, I am a payroll she and when I started Flylady I would leave my house at 6:30 in the morning to be at work by 8 and get home at 6:30 in the evening.  Leaving me little time to do blessings, laundry, dinner and sink shining.  After about 3 years of flying, I had my sweet baby boy and then I had an infant to take care of during it all.  Where's the hubs you may wonder? Well he grew up in a house that the man did the yard work and major house repairs, not so much cleaning and taking care of kiddos.  So he had to learn himself what to do, and I had to learn how to ask him as well.  I now would love to report that my awesome hubby shines the sink, makes the bed and he helps our son with his homework each night (and has been doing this for a few years now).  I really owe that to the Flylady system.


Home Blessing Hour:
One of the things that used to frustrate me was that I wanted so badly to do my home blessing on Mondays in the one hour time frame, like Flylady.  Well, after battling traffic for two hours (I am a payroll she), and needing to get dinner started as soon as I walked in the door, that one hour just wasn't there for me.  It was so frustrating and I felt constantly like I was failing at flying.  I finally had to bite my tongue, suck it up and just split up the chores through out the week.  It took a little while but I realized that I can't have Flylady's routine because I do not have her job, schedule or home.  I have to take her ideas and make them my own and fit my home and family.  I am essentially the "Flylady" of my house. :)  I now will do a blessing or two in the morning and one in the evening.  I typically get my blessings done by Tuesday afternoon, but no later than Wednesday morning.

Zones:
The zones have always been a hard one for me.  I couldn't fit 15 minutes in after work to tackle a zone to save my life.  But how am I supposed to "Spring Clean" my home with the zone work if I can't fit in 15 minutes? Again, I felt as though I had failed because I couldn't do it the way Flylady said to do it. The things that I missed on this one was that I could do something towards my zone.  If I had thrown something in the oven to bake for 15 minutes, I would use that time.  If I had a spare 5 minutes in the afternoon, I'd do something.  I may not have been able to find the 15 minutes but I could find 1, 2 or 3 minutes throughout my evening or even the morning to do something towards my zones.  End result? No Spring Cleaning!! :)

Do it now principle:
The "do it now" term is basically doing what needs to be done right then.  Do not think about it or else you will just sit down and forget about it and then it grows into a large time consuming task.  When looking at your control journal you see your list of routines / zones / blessings, whatever it may be, you just take the first one and go.  This was another tough one for me even being a Veteran Flybaby, but I finally found a way to make it work a little easier.  I like the term "eat frog first".  I am not sure if that is even the correct wording and I know its not the exact quote.  But it means to do the hardest thing first.  I changed up my routines so that my morning routine had a frog first thing on the list which is my workout (ugh).  On my home blessing my frog was mopping my floors (double ugh), afternoon routine was swishing the hubby's bathroom (extreme ugh).  So do your hardest task first and then the "do it now" phrase won't be so hard.  After all, you just ate a frog, what else could you "do now" that could be worse?

My greatest lesson I learned from Flylady system was that it didn't matter how little of something I did, as long as I did something to push me forward.  My biggest accomplishment was our paper clutter.  It took me 2 years to clean out 15 years worth of paper work.  My husband and I had a 5 file drawer cabinet and four plastic tote boxes full of paper work.  I started just shredding a couple pages per day.  There were days I would take an entire folder and shred it on my lunch break at work and some days I'd only feel like shredding two pieces of paper.  When I looked at all I had left to do, it would seem overwhelming but I'd just make a deal with myself that if I would shred two pieces of paper right that moment, then I would call it good and go reward myself.  It didn't matter how much or how little I'd do because every single piece of paper was progression towards the goal.  I now have only two file drawers of organized by year, non-clutter, important papers that I can easily find in under 30 seconds. Two years may seem like a long time but it is something I never have to do again.  I just file or shred what I have when it comes in and that's it.  Now that this has all been established and is organized, I decided to reward myself with a larger prize.  We went and had our will made up and a  I had a life insurance policy taken out on myself to protect my hubby and son.  Being that I have everything in order, it was easy to find all the records I needed to do both of these things.  And the bonus is that my husband can find it easily if something was to happen to me.  I feel so empowered knowing that I have taken care of my family and it all started with shredding two pieces of paper per day, but it ultimately started with Flylady. 

Well that's all I have for now.  I am planning on adding to my "Flylady" tips soon and will post about my other flying adventures in the future, so keep on a look out for those.  If you have any questions regarding the Flylady System or how I made it all work for me, you may email me or leave a comment below.  I love helping others get their wings a flapping with routines.

Talk to you again soon.

-Kim