I finally got done steam vac'ing my house! Yeah!!! It looks great. It's taken me forever to get it done. My mom gave us the steam vac for my birthday last year, but because of my Chostochondritis flaring, I haven't been able to do it.

The past month though I have been on a mission to get my house to stay clean. I started a new routine, and I'm so happy with how it is going. Because of the routine, I have focused on getting the carpets on just one floor of the house done at a time. This seemed like it would be a pain, but our steam vac is actually quite easy to set up, and that gives the rest of the house for the kids to play in so they don't end up playing on wet floors.

So, here is my solution for keeping a house actually CLEAN with minimal effort. Every morning I:
- wipe down the shower in our bathroom, the counters and toilets in all of the bathrooms and clean the inside of the toilets in all of the bathrooms
- clean the surfaces in the kitchen
- put a load of laundry on (Erik puts our laundry away, and on the weekend does any laundry that doesn't get done during the week... have I mentioned I have the best husband on the planet??)

These rooms don't get dirty because they get cleaned everyday, so doing ALL of that takes less than 15 minutes, and our bathrooms like freshly cleaned all day everyday. I wish I could say the same for the kitchen, but it is such a high traffic spot that it tends to collect junk. Still, it is clean at the start of every day.

Once I am done the everyday stuff, I work for 30-45 minutes on one floor of the house, the same floor each day for a week, and then switch to another floor the next week (we have 4 floors in our house). This means that every room gets a very thorough cleaning once a month, yes I realize that is enough to make some people shudder, but we are not very good about getting dusting and stuff done, so this is FANTASTIC for us, and remember those places that get really icky are getting cleaned everyday.

That just leaves the floors that need mopped, which we can get away with doing once a week, so I make sure I hit those at some point during the week and I am set! My plan is to pick one big thing on each floor to do along with maintenance cleaning each month. This month I picked the carpet, so everything got steam vac'd. Next month I'm thinking scrubbing floors by hand and doing baseboards... but i haven't decided for sure, I'd also really like to do closets and cupboards, so we'll see. One more floor left this month. This is week 4, but we had some bigger than normal messes this month because it's the first month so I had to spend 2 weeks on the family room level, but I'm okay with that, this system feels very forgiving to me. I hope I can maintain it!