Cleaning schedules

The Monthly Cleaning Schedule Nobody Tells You About

Updated 15 August 2026 · 4 min read

Weekly cleaning keeps a house functioning. Monthly cleaning is what stops it slowly declining in ways you cannot quite name.

You know the feeling: the house is technically clean, you did the floors on Tuesday, and yet it still feels tired. That is almost always the monthly list going undone, because none of it is urgent and none of it is visible until it has been ignored for half a year.

Why monthly jobs get skipped

They have no trigger. The bins get taken out because they are full. The washing gets done because you have run out of socks. Nothing runs out to tell you the shower head needs descaling, so it simply never happens until the water comes out sideways.

The fix is not discipline. It is a list somewhere visible, with tick boxes and dates.

The monthly list

Kitchen

• Descale the kettle. Monthly in a hard water area, every two months elsewhere.
• Run a cleaning cycle in the dishwasher, and clean the filter at the bottom by hand.
• Wipe the inside of the microwave properly, not just the splatter you can see.
• Clean the extractor filter. Most lift out and go in the dishwasher, which surprises people.
• Clear the fridge of anything expired, and wipe one shelf while you are in there.

Bathroom

• Descale the shower head. Tie a bag of descaler around it and leave it overnight.
• Wash the shower curtain or wipe the screen seals, where mould starts.
• Clean the extractor fan cover. This is the single most-skipped job in any house.
• Bleach or replace the toilet brush, which is grimmer than anyone wants to think about.

Whole house

• Wash bath mats, tea towels and cleaning cloths on a hot wash, together.
• Vacuum under and behind the big furniture, not just around it.
• Wipe light switches, door handles and remotes.
• Check smoke alarm batteries. Takes ten seconds and is the most important item here.
• Dust the tops of doors, frames and picture rails.

Laundry

• Run an empty hot wash with washing machine cleaner, and wipe the rubber door seal.
• Clean the tumble dryer filter properly, including the mesh behind it.

How to actually make it happen

Pick one day a month, the same day every time. First Saturday, last Sunday, whatever fits. The date matters far less than it being fixed, because a floating job is a job that floats away.

The whole list takes about 90 minutes if you have been keeping up. Considerably longer the first time, so treat the first pass as a one-off and do it in two sittings.

If 90 minutes in one go is unrealistic, split the list across four weekends and do a quarter each time. Fifteen minutes on a Saturday is much easier to defend than an afternoon.

What helps

• Citric acid in bulk rather than branded descaler sachets. It is the same active ingredient at a fraction of the cost, and it handles kettles, shower heads and taps.
• Washing machine cleaner tablets, bought a year at a time so you never skip a month for want of having any.
• A long-handled duster for door tops and picture rails, which is what stops the job requiring a chair.
• A cheap set of spare filters for the extractor and dryer, so a dirty one can be swapped and cleaned at leisure rather than blocking the job.

The twelve-month version

The printable has twelve columns rather than a single list. Tick the month as you go and you get something genuinely useful: a visible record of what you have actually kept up with.

It is mildly confronting the first year. It is extremely satisfying the second.

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