Originally it was structured around the Flylady way of doing things. So even though every section is virtually identical (with minor variations and different examples to reflect the space), it's split up into the 5 "zones": dining room/entry, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, living room. That accounts for 5 of the 8 weeks, and then we have a week dedicated to the dungeon (more on that in a later post), a week for extra rooms (laundry, office, play, craft, etc.), and a week for seasonal and outside chores. As an aside, the Spring PCCX is organized the same way, while Winter and Summer are just the 5 weeks, lacking the seasonal/outside section and incorporating bonus rooms and dungeons into the base period. Anyway, this one section a week plan works fine for monthly tasks, or maybe for PCCX if one has a smaller house. But for those of us with many bedrooms or other things to throw off the balance I think it's better to take a different approach. For example, in my "main house", i.e. not including mom's rooms, I have 3 bedrooms and 1 small bathroom. I can finish my bathroom (if I really work at it) in a single day, but each bedroom takes a minimum of several days.
Another tactic is to do all "like tasks" at the same time for the whole house. Wash *all* the windows at once. Scrub *all* the hard floors at once. Sometimes I find this makes sense; dealing with everyone's wardrobes changing from hot to cool weather at once for instance. Other things, like the floors, I think are too big a job to do all at once for every room. That's just me though, I do see the potential benefits of it for other people.
I'm often tempted by the thought of picking a corner - any corner - and starting there, washing, scrubbing, polishing, dusting, moving everything in a 3' square before moving on. But then I think that's too much changing tasks and thus inefficient in the long run.
So where does that leave me? I think what I'll do this time is take room at a time but without regard to order or how long it takes me to finish. Start at the top of the room, dusting cobwebs off the ceiling and washing walls, and moving down and out from there. If a room like the bathroom gets done in a day that's great, but if a room takes me a week I'm not going to fuss. I'm hoping it evens out in the end. I have 12 areas (1 of which is my dungeon) not including outside. Obviously I can't spend a week on each one, but at least 3 of them should be 1-day projects.
That decided, where to begin? As each room/area is completed it will have to be maintained while at the same time moving on to the next room. So do I start with the harder/longer rooms so that there's fewer areas to maintain while I'm working on the big ones? Or do I start with those little 1-day rooms so I have that many areas to check off the list? I think I'll just wait until Monday and see which room is bugging me the most. Not the most logical method, but it has potential. :)
So do you have any thoughts as to how you'll tackle your home? Any of these ideas strike your fancy, or do you have a method I haven't thought of?
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