Oh Crap! – Musings of an Unperfect Mommy

Control Journal Part 3 – Zones

October 25, 2011

As promised here (finally) is my post on Fly Lady’s Detailed Zone cleaning lists and kind of what zones are anyway. This idea makes so much sense and I had already heard about a similar concept in Organizing From the Inside Out which helped break each room down further into various zones to keep like items with like items. But, I digress.

To start with, Fly Lady took her house and broke it down into five zones to clean:

Zone 1 – Entrance, Porch, Dining Room

Zone 2 – Kitchen

Zone 3 – Bathroom and One Extra Room

Zone 4 – The Master Bedroom

Zone 5 – The Living Room

Each zone gets decluttered and then deep cleaned and then maintained by focusing on that one room one week a month. This makes sense! You can’t deep clean or maintain if there is clutter so you start there. After the zone is cleared of clutter and you have items where they belong, you can deep clean. Once you deep clean you can maintain by doing just a few things in that room each month and voila – clean home! Most of my rooms are relatively clutter free, although some has crept back in since we moved and have acquired a few things in the last 6 years. So, I’m needing to declutter and deep clean each room again.

Now a word here about the zones and detailed cleaning lists: make the zones and detailed lists yours. Your home is your home and you know how many rooms it has and what stuff is in there. Her lists are really a jumping off p9int to get you started. Once you get going and start doing the work, you will probably get to a point where you can cross something off the list if it’s not something you need to do. Let’s take a for instance here. This week is zone 4 the master bedroom and here’s the flight plan and cleaning list for that room. When I do the detailed cleaning I am not going to straighten the inside of my drawers. Why not? Because they are already neat and personally, no one I know is going to look in my dresser to see what’s in there. It’s a personal issue. She also has “clean off desks” and I’ll change that into “clean off nightstands” because we don’t have desks in our master bedroom. Are you getting the idea here? Cross out what you don’t need to clean if it’s not part of the zone and add in what you do need to clean. One of the things she usually has on her lists is cleaning the light switch plate and I think that’s a good one because I NEVER think about cleaning that. So I’m making sure I get that done. And really it will take what – five seconds? Done.

I want to take a moment here to go a step further and tell how I break a room down into smaller zones. This is where you put like items in one place so you can find them easily or have easy access to them. Like my nightstand – it’s a mini zone all in itself. I have the alarm clock, prayer books, a rosary, books I am reading, etc. on the top. In the drawer I keep pens, paper, journal – things I use but don’t need out in the open. It also has a shelf that I keep my favorite movies and more personal books handy for night time viewing and reading. That’s all I keep there – if anything else strays there I need to take it off and put it where it belongs. I have learned to keep my mini zones relatively clean and only what needs to be there goes there.

So, I downloaded and printed out all of Flylady’s Detailed Cleaning Lists (use the link on the page) and here they are ready to go in my Control Journal. As stated above, as I clean I will cross out on the list what I don’t need to do and write in what I do need to do in each room. Later, I will rewrite the lists and make them my own and use those lists for zone cleaning.

Okay, I think that covers zone cleaning. It really is a great system and she gives you the map to start and like I said before, you just need to start.

The next step is “pantry list” which leads to making a shopping list and then menu planning. Believe me – all those things make putting meals on the table much easier so stay tuned! And no, I wasn’t born organized at all, I had to learn over the last almost 30 years of marriage and parenting. But once you have a system, things just fall into place. Trust me!

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» Control Journal Part 3 – Zones » Oh Crap! – Musings of an Unperfect Mommy

Control Journal Part 3 – Zones

October 25, 2011

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