How to manage a 4 bed/4 bathroom home

[Mummyk1982]

Hi there,

I suspect I may be about to become a serial poster on this board. We are just in the process of buying a new home (new build) and compared to our current property it's huge- so now I'm starting to wonder how I going to keep it clean and tidy.
I have an 11 month old daughter- who I think must be the most untidy child!- she always has toys and books out quicker than I can tidy them. When I'm not at work (I'm fortunate to work only 2-3 days a week) I find myself spending most of my time entertaining my daughter, tidying the flat and cleaning. My flat is 2 bedrooms, I'm moving in to a 3 storey town house with 4 large double bedrooms, 2 ensuites (mine is a full 3 piece), a further 3 piece bathroom and a cloakroom, along with a large kitchen and a huge lounge diner and also a garden (which I've never had before). Wisely (or not), we've chosen to have all the bathrooms fully tiled so as not to have to worry about future decoration, I have tiled bathroom floors, Amtico flooring to kitchen and downstairs hall, just off white (!!!!) carpet throughout, and a beautiful gloss white kitchen with a black silestone work surface.

So- I struggle to keep my flat clean and tidy.....I think I'm going to need to be quite regimented in my approach to the new place. My husband works full time including weekends- does earlys and lates and will have an hour commute each day- so as I only work part time I don't have a great expectation of him with the housework.

Does anyone have any advice or a cleaning schedule they use that might help?

Ps- I can't afford a cleaner! :-)

Your new house sounds fab
I think that the fact its a new build will help as everything will be shiny and new to start with. It might not be as hard as you think to keep tidy if you have more space, does that include more storage? If not i would look at that first and make sure everything has a place and tidy and put away as you go along so it never gets too messy. Get into a routine for your cleaning but the bedrooms and bathrooms that are not getting used shouldn't need doing too often anyway and won't be really dirty so should only need a quick wipe round to keep them looking nice.
Someone may come along with some good advice regarding a schedule but I'm afraid I can't help there. I don't really need one as I can clean my cosy little shoebox from top to bottom in a couple of hours (when I can be bothered )

If there is only you, your dh and dd then a lot of the rooms will not be used and only need a quick once over every week or so.

Yeah there's a fair bit more storage but not quite so much loft space- so I think I'm going to need to be ruthless in decluttering over the next few weeks. It's a fair point about room usage- but it'll be jut one bedroom and the corresponding en suite that won't be used every day- probably jut once a week if the mother in law stays over- all other rooms have allocated functions! :-)

I'm hoping to treat myself to a few new cleaning gadgets to keep me interested- hubby already bought me a steam cleaner. Am thinking a cordless Dyson might be a good investment with the number of stairs I'll have to climb.....

I'd just use two of the bathrooms I think.

Cleaning four bathrooms every week will be a pain in the butt!

Can you ask the developers to change the living area carpet to a wooden or hard floor? My friend is moving into a new build and got the company to change the flooring in the main living spaces to hard wood because she has dogs. They were quite accommodating but she did have to pay a bit extra but not that much in comparison to installing the new wooden floors herself. Upstairs has carpet but all of the ground floor is wooden and looks lovely.

For tiled areas try and make any grout between floor tiles grey. Having white grout on floor tiles is an impossible task to keep clean. Luckily we were advised by a workmate of DH's before we tiled our floors.

Our house is over 3 floors and we didn't use the top floor, apart from visitors till we were expecting DC4. DC1 and DC2 shared. We just have it a Hoover once a month for the first few years we lived in the house. Can you plan not to use the top floor for a while?

We also trained the kids from toddlers to take off shoes in the house. It makes a huge difference to the state of upstairs carpets.