If you’ve wanted to start a cleaning routine but haven’t known how or where to start, The 7-Day SIMPLY CLEAN Kick Start Challenge is for you. If you need a little encouragement and help sticking with a cleaning routine, you’ll love this challenge as well. I started developing my cleaning routine for myself almost 20 years ago and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tweaked and changed it, but it’s the one thing that remains the same in the midst of a busy life. I hope you try it out and see how it works for you!

This challenge is straight from my best-selling book Simply Clean – grab the book for even more!

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 3 in Simply Clean:

(SATURDAY) DAY 7: LAUNDRY

That pile of laundry staring you down? Take today to wash and fold everything and put it all away. Laundry in its incomplete state can be overwhelming and can definitely give your home a cluttered look and feel even if it’s in a pile on the bedroom floor. Moving forward, I recommend that you do one load of laundry every day (especially if you have more than four people in your household), but first things first: you need to catch up on your laundry quickly. Enlist any help you can get from family members, especially if you are looking at a mountain of laundry. Use this technique when you get behind or if you’d prefer to do your laundry weekly instead of daily:

  1. Gather all the laundry in the house and put the baskets or hampers within reach of the laundry room. My recommendation for order is adult clothes, kid clothes, bedding, towels, kitchen towels, and cleaning cloths and rags.
  2. Line the baskets up in order of what’s going in the washing machine first to last. Start with adult clothes—do one load of whites (on warm) and one load of darks (on cold) per adult. You could also combine these clothes into one load and wash everything on cold. Next in line is the kids’ laundry: one basket per child—no sorting, all of it goes in the same load on cold. Depend-ing on how much laundry there is and your washer and dryer’s capacity, you can combine these loads into one, but for sorting’s sake it’s probably easier to keep each child’s clothes together as one load per child. Remember that even little ones can help fold clothes or just toss socks and undies in a drawer. You’re laying the groundwork for later, and trust me, it will pay off.
  3. After all the clothing has been washed, it’s time for bedding.
  4. Once the bedding is done, move on to bath towels, hand towels, and bath mats. Wash and fold everything and put it away. Take the extra second or two to make sure you’re putting everything away neatly; it’ll be worth it as you continue.
  5. Finally, wash any kitchen towels and any cleaning cloths or rags. Fold these and put them away.

While each load is washing and drying, fold, hang, and put away each and every load as soon as it comes out of the dryer. Depending on the wash and dry time, this will most likely go on all day but it just takes minutes to fold and put away the clothing in between each load. If you can’t finish it all up, put it off until the next day and finish it up before moving on. If you have a lot of laundry, feel free to divide this up into two days.

Once you have finished with all your washing, put your washer on a clean cycle or simply run it with the hottest water setting. Select the extra rinse option and add ¾ cup of white vinegar or ¾ cup non-chlorine bleach (not both!) to the bleach dispenser or to your washtub and fill it to its maximum level. Allow the cycle to run until it has completed. Open the door and let the washer air-dry. If you have a front-loading or HE (high-efficiency) washing machine, you will want to keep it open in between loads to allow it to dry completely. This will keep it from smelling and it will keep mildew away.

Once you’re all caught up, I suggest, again, doing a load or two of laundry every day. In Simply Clean, I’ll show you how to take it from dirty to folded to put away even on busy weekdays. Don’t worry about that quite yet, but know that I have a simple method to help you keep your laundry pile at a minimum in just minutes each day.

With your laundry done, you have officially completed the 7-Day Simply Clean Kick Start! I hope you feel like you have achieved a monumental goal, and even if you don’t feel like your home is where you want it to be, you have started a simple and effective cleaning routine in just a week.

Here’s how the challenge is going to work – every day for 7 days (July 30-August 5) you’ll have an assigned task to complete – you’ll see that the tasks semi-mirror my cleaning routine. Once you’ve completed the 7 tasks, you’ll be ready to continue with the Simply Clean Method as you move forward. I’ll be sharing the daily tasks on social media and on the blog. Want to join in and get a jumpstart on your cleaning routine and bring a little order to your home? Order Simply Clean and follow along!

Coming in a little late? No worries! Start when and where you can and follow along! Check out the links below for where you can find the daily prompts and follow what works for you:

Order Simply Clean
Follow Clean Mama on Facebook
Follow Clean Mama on Instagram
Join Private FB group – Homekeeping Society
Want my posts sent as an email reminder? Sign up in the sidebar for those posts!

Catch up on any of the days here:

DAY 1: DECLUTTERING 101 
DAY 2: BATHROOMS
DAY 3: DUSTING
DAY 4: VACUUMING
DAY 5: FLOOR WASHING
DAY 6: CATCH-ALL DAY
DAY 7: LAUNDRY

Up for another challenge? As soon as this one is done, you can do the 28-Day Simply Clean Challenge. That challenge is straight from my book but you can also get the daily challenge tasks delivered daily right to your inbox with a FREE printable checklist to use as you follow along. Go to the link below and to sign up (this is NOT my newsletter sign up form, you will only get this challenge if you sign up for it!)

The 28-Day Simply Clean Challenge