When I quit my job, Cody and I had been planning on how to live off of one salary, with that being a teachers salary with a masters degree and coaching supplement. The first step would be to declutter the house and throw away a lot of junk, give away a lot of items, and sell a lot of items. But also Cody and I had to reevaluate our budget and spending.
Now we are currently living the same way as before when we had two salaries (mine being an engineer), but we aren't saving nearly what we used to. We are able to save about 20% of Cody's salary right now but once we have 2-3 kids, that will drop down to 12% and that is ok and planned. We saved up 6 years of our salaries to put a large down payment on our house, save up for a dog and kids, and a previously owned dream Truck for Cody, and preparing for me to stay home with our kids for 5-10 years. One of the ways we save is to eat out less and to also keep grocery trips to every other week and aim to spend $100 a week on average on groceries. No coffee's or gas station snacks either or online shopping unless for a special occasion. For birthdays and Christmas we ask for necessities only, we buy things we know we will need in the future little by little like baby clothes and items. And the other item we have cut out is paying a maid once a month to clean our house. I now clean our house and enjoy doing so! From someone who has never cleaned a house in her life, it was SO daunting. So let me give you a few tips on how to make that easier for you:
My cleaning items and a close up.
1. At first it may be daunting so maybe split the upstairs and downstairs into two separate days back to back. Plan for 6.5 hours to clean the house or 9.5 hours for a deep clean.
2. Start the laundry asap. Strip the sheets and pillow cases and put all of the towels in the laundry machine and get that started. While that is washing place the back up/second sets on the beds and make them up and place the back up/second set of towels out.
3. Start from top to bottom so you aren't cleaning twice. Dust surfaces, fan blades, stain spindles, then blinds, dust the baseboards, (all with swifters), and wipe kitchen counters down before cleaning the floors. And taking any trash out of any room is always the last step of the day, if you do this any earlier, you will always have more trash but don't want to put any in the fresh trash cans.
4. I then focus room to room, I usually move to the kitchen and clean appliances and inside appliances next with wet or soapy paper towels or rags. Then I move to counter tops, kitchen table (with pledge wipes), cleaning granite, stove tops, and hand prints on cabinets or appliances with the wet rags. I organize anything that has become cluttered in drawers as well.
5. Next is the living room, I wipe down the couches with a wet rag and then once dry, I vacuum all remaining dog hair or dirt off with a handheld vacuum.
6. I then windex all of the windows around the house and Mr. Clean all handprints on the walls.
7. I also wipe down all doors Lucy has made dirty from jumping.
8. I then move to the bathrooms and start with the mirrors, and windexing the shower doors. Then I wipe down the counter tops and clean the sinks out with a wet rag. I spray the shower and tub with scrubbin bubbles and let that sit for 5 minutes then wipe or wash down. Then I move to the toilets and clean all around the toilets with clorox wipes and use scrubbin bubbles toilet bowl cleaner on the inside of the bowls and scrub that down. Then I move to the bathroom floor using a mop, soap and water to clean and dry with my dollar store rags.
9. Then I set the roomba loose downstairs for an hour to vacuum then upstairs for an hour. While the roomba is vacuuming, I take a very wet rag and spot clean dirty areas on the carpet from our dog. If the area is very bad like after a rainy and muddy spring, I would use my carpet cleaner vacuum cleaner in that area.
10. While the roomba is vacuuming, I sweep the hardwood and then use my Shaw hard surface cleaner and a dry mop to "polish" and clean the floor.
11. And that is it! Keep it spotless for a day and let it unravel itself slowly over the next 2-4 weeks.
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