How to Create a Chore Schedule for Keeping a Shared House Clean

Living in a shared house can be both stressful and fun. Parties, hangouts, movie nights and some inside jokes are just a few reasons living with roommates is fun. However, when it comes to chores then it might not be so pleasant.

An easy method to avoid misunderstandings and passive aggressive behavior is by talking about chores with your flatmates. Below are some of the few ideas on how you can split up household duties and avoid any sort of drama.

How to Create a Cleaning Schedule with Your Housemates?

Here are some essential tips for creating a perfect schedule with your flat mates. So let’s get started.

Figure Out the Chores

Try to figure out the tasks that need to be done immediately to keep your apartment, dorm or shared house clean. You can have a discussion with your flatmate or roommates about the chores you’ll all need to take on so your house remains nice and clean.

After defining the chores, there’s another task that needs to be done and that is defining the responsibilities of each and every person in the shared house. You can decide how often these chores are needed to be carried out like for daily, weekly or monthly basis.

Assign each of the chores to the roommates – such as things like sweeping, cleaning the kitchen, washing dishes, vacuuming, things like scrubbing the toilet, taking out all the trash, paying the house bills, dusting and throwing out expired food from the fridge. In short you need to set a weekly or monthly schedule with your roommates.

If you and your housemates are each responsible for cleaning up after your daily routine tasks such as washing dishes or cleaning the house garage shouldn’t be that much of a worry. It will be good to have good conservation with your housemates nice and early to avoid any kind of problems in the future.

Assign Each Chore to a Certain Housemate

Each cleaning chore should be well assigned, and it's a pretty good idea to find out what type of cleaning tasks your roommate enjoys or he/she is comfortable with and also try to figure out what tasks your roommate hates.

By this way you will get an idea for assigning the daily routine tasks and you will be able to make your cleaning schedule as efficient as possible.

Make a Cleaning Chart or Checklist

Now you have all the details of the tasks needed to be done, it’s time to implement and make a solid plan on a piece of paper to let everyone know what’s expected from them. There are lots of online tools you can use for creating a good cleaning chart or schedule.

It’s important to have fun when creating a good cleaning chart or checklist and try to involve everyone in making the chart. The more suggestions you get from everyone – the more likely they are to follow your plan.

Must Set Chore Deadlines

Whether the task is simple or difficult, it's on a daily or monthly basis – must set certain deadlines for the chores needed to be done. If it’s a daily task you can decide on a specific time of night that you and your house mates should expect the chore to be completed.

And if it’s weekly, biweekly or monthly, you and your housemates can decide on a day the chores are needed to be done by and how you will hold each other accountable so all the chores that are needed to get done are finished in a good timely manner and everyone contributes as they should to keep the apartment or house clean.

Keep Communication Open

Make sure as you go about your shores schedule that you keep your communication open with your housemates. If the chore schedule isn’t working for someone, sit down with roommates and try to figure out what can be done to make it fairer or to hear their complaints.

Set up housemate meetings to discuss all of your matters and chores and try to figure out the importance of any specific task whether it should be done more often or less or discuss other issues.

If you are noticing that your house hasn't been kept clean as it should be, then discuss hiring any cleaning service to come in or dedicate any specific day to be a roommate day where you all friends spend it hanging out together as well as cleaning your house together.

Final Thoughts

To keep your place clean – whether it’s an apartment, flat or a house it’s your utmost responsibility to create a proper chore schedule so that you can keep your place clean and tidy.

Discuss all the problems with your roommates and try to work in good spirits and also set a proper break time in between the chore schedule!