My Take On Zone Cleaning: Or The 13 Zones
Wednesdays are simplicity days at SimpleProductivity blog.
One of Flylady’s big ideas is breaking the house down into five zones and clean in the zone-of-the-week, one week in the month for each zone.
Being the geek that I am, I had two problems with this system: no month contains five full weeks, meaning that two zones would be consistently short-changed; and I have way more than five rooms to care for.
Add to that I always felt like I was cleaning things that didn’t need to be cleaned…
I guess if you cleaned every day you could get past the first objection, but there were days when I just couldn’t fit it in. And covering all that territory in five zones overwhelmed me.
So I decided to modify the zones.
Why 13 Zones?
Looking at the calendar, I could find two logical divisions: by months or by a set number of weeks. I wanted something that would rotate around more frequently than spending a whole month in a zone, so I decided to find out what would work with the 52 weeks in a year.
52 doesn’t divide by much. 2 and 26; or 4 and 13. (Don’t you just love prime numbers?) 26 zones would be too many, and 2 or 4 not enough. So that left 13.
(I told you I was a geek!)
Will 13 Work with my Space?
I next decided to break my house into 13 areas so that I could assign them out. Here are my rooms:
- Entry
- Music room
- Dining room
- Powder room/coat closet
- Game room
- Great room
- Kitchen and pantry
- Laundry area
- Butler’s pantry/storage area
- Office
- Guest/craft room
- Child’s room
- Master bedroom
- Master bath
- Upstairs bathroom
That’s 15 areas. Some are bigger than others; some are used daily and others hardly at all. So I could combine them into effort/size groups like this:
- Entry
- Music room
- Dining room
- Powder room/coat closet
- Game room
- Great room
- Kitchen and pantry
- Laundry area; Butler’s pantry/storage area
- Office
- Guest/craft room; Upstairs bathroom
- Child’s room
- Master bedroom
- Master bath
Creating the Cleaning Lists
Once I had the zones, it was a matter of figuring out what needed to be done. I first made a list of the features most rooms shared, then took a walk through the house, visiting each room.
Some things can be generalized. If a room has a window, it needs to be cleaned, along with any window treatments. If there is a door, that has to be cleaned. The floor (all my rooms came with floors) will have to be dealt with. The furniture needs to be cleaned.
Some things can be specific: bedrooms have beds, and mattresses to be flipped. Bathrooms have toilets that need to be detailed. Some rooms have bookshelves that need to be emptied and dusted.
Next on the list were very specific things: washing the afghans in the great room; cleaning the kitchen small appliances; cleaning the dryer vent; and such other sundry tasks.
But That’s Not All I Clean
I don’t want to give the impression that this is all I clean. I still have my weekly cleaning sessions, which hits all the bathrooms, the floors and the kitchen. I also dust weekly and take care of the obvious smudges.
By modifying the zone cleaning system to have 13 zones, I make it so that I can hit all the rooms and have time to work on them, yet not overwhelm myself with unnecessary cleaning.
