How to keep your home clean in the school holidays

No matter how good our intentions are, it is really hard to keep our home clean over the school holidays.

The house feels like it constantly needs tidying or something needs cleaning, the laundry piles up extremely quickly and our homes tend to take the bottom place on the priority list during the school holidays.

Which is completely fine – making memories with our children is a hundred times more important than how clean your home is.

However – for most of us, the state our home is in, also really affects how calm we feel as mums.

If the house is chaotic, my mind will also be chaotic.

So having routines that work over the school holidays to keep on top of your home is important and it is a part of self-care.

Trying to keep on top of your home in the same way that you do when the kids are in school is going to feel impossible.

It’s going to make you feel really defeated as well, if you get to the end of the day and hardly anything has been crossed off your list.

I always say that with the kids home, something that would normally take me 10 minutes takes at least an hour.

So it’s time to make a plan.

The secret to keeping your home clean in the school holidays

The secret to being able to keep on top of your home over the school holidays, with the cleaning and the laundry and all those things that need to be done is to have two different routines.

Your main one and a school holiday one.

It might sound like that is more work, but once you have set up your routine and written it down somewhere, the hardest part is over – it’s just do it then.

Typically, I tend to clean on a Monday morning – I will do the dusting and the bathrooms etc all in one go. Then on another day I do a zone clean in a different room each week, so that is how I keep on top of all the deep cleaning tasks.

You can see my cleaning routine here.

This works really well in the school term.

It doesn’t work quite so well in the school holidays.

So having a second routine that makes sure that the essential weekly cleaning gets done really does help.

Just knowing that everything will get done releases a lot of mental pressure as well, and feeling less stressed is always a win!

What does a school holiday cleaning routine look like?

We have less time over the school holidays, so we need to be a lot more intentional with the time that we do have.

Dedicating a full day to cleaning, isn’t going to work for the majority of people – if it works for you then do whatever works best for you!

The best way to manage the cleaning when the kids are home all the time is to break it down into daily tasks.

Or if daily tasks doesn’t work for you, try room by room.

This could look like:

There is no right or wrong answer, it comes down to personal preference and what will actually work for you and your family.

Task tends to work better for me.

I find it hard to stick to a room by room type cleaning routine, but a task based one works well for us.

If you aren’t sure which to try, give both a try – give it a couple of weeks before you make a decision on which you prefer.

If you go with one, and next school holiday it doesn’t work, just change it again – whatever your decision it isn’t set in stone.

Depending on the season, things that have always worked don’t always work any longer and that is okay.

When do you deep clean in the summer holidays?

I used to try really hard to stick to my normal cleaning routine, where I do one day of cleaning and a zone cleaning day on a different day and it just does not work in the school holidays.

It might work some weeks, but 80% of the time it doesn’t.

There is nothing more frustrating than feeling like you aren’t ticking things off your todo list.

My weekly tasks cover the important cleaning jobs, so those cleaning tasks are higher priority over the summer.

The deeper cleaning tasks such as cleaning the oven or the skirting boards or feather dusting, they are not quite as important.

They do have to be done, but they don’t need to be done every week.

During the school term I manage them with zone cleaning, each week over a period of 9 weeks (We have 9 rooms in our home) I do a deep clean in one room.

So every 9 weeks I know that the deeper cleaning tasks will be done, and I don’t have to think about them the rest of the time.

For example, the first week of the month I deep clean the bathroom, the second week our bedroom, the third the playroom etc etc.

You can read more about it here if you want a bit more information about it.

While in theory this would work in the school holidays, in reality it just doesn’t.

So my approach to the deep cleaning tasks over the school holidays is that they can wait.

Unless it is something that can’t wait.

Then I will just do it as a task on my todo list.

As an example, I wouldn’t normally feather dust in the school holidays, but yesterday I noticed there are tiny spider webs everywhere on the ceiling in the living room – I’m guessing there must have been a hatch out/or they have started coming in as the weather changes.

So I just grabbed my feather duster and did a quick feather dust in the living room.

That was it though, I didn’t do any other deeper tasks in the living room.

It’s not perfect, but it works.

Having that little bit of a break helps get back into routine as well once everyone is back in school – I’m always ready to scrub the house from top to bottom when everyone goes back!

How do I fit in cleaning tasks in the school holidays?

When you chose to do your routine is completely up to you.

There is no right or wrong way to do it.

You could get up earlier and do it before the kids wake if that works for you.

Or you could do it once your partner comes home from work.

Or you could even break it down into smaller chunks and just do it throughout the day.

For example if it was a dusting day, you could dust upstairs in the morning and downstairs in the afternoon.

Or you could break it down even further into room by room if you don’t have much time to do anything.

The more it suits you and your family and your situation, the easier and less daunting it’s going to be to stick to it.

It doesn’t matter if that isn’t how other people are doing it, just do what works for you.

Posts you might be interested in

Here are some other posts that you might be interested in reading, if there is anything else that you would like to see or find out more about just let me know!

How to make a daily cleaning routine

How to re-freame cleaning your home as self-care

The power of a 15 minute reset on your home

Zone Cleaning (Flylady)

Remember, this is the school holidays – your house isn’t supposed to look like a magazine home, it’s supposed to be a little bit messy and little bit chaotic!

Having a routine to just keep on top of things does help with our sanity and stress levels over the summer.

If you decide to have someone over for a coffee or a play date or an appointment, just having that routine in place means that it’s not a mad panic to tidy the house before they come over.

And that is such a nice feeling!

I hope you found this post helpful, if there is anything you would like to know more about, let me know!

Beth x