When it comes to keeping a kitchen clean, a cleaning checklist can help get you organized. Need some ideas on how to develop a kitchen cleaning checklist of your own? These ideas will help:
Daily tasks
Daily tasks are those basic cleaning kitchen tasks that should be done on a regular, daily basis. Examples of daily kitchen tasks include:
- Washing dishes
- Scouring the kitchen sink
- Polishing the chrome (prevents the buildup of limescale)
- Wiping down the countertops, kitchen table, high chairs, and chairs with a disinfectant
- Mopping the kitchen floor with floor cleaner
- Wiping down fingerprints on appliances, doors, cabinet doors, and door jambs with an all-purpose cleaner
- Removing spills from the hob, inside the oven, and microwave
- Wiping down the outside of small appliances such as the coffee maker, toaster, stand mixers, and blender with a window cleaning product. This prevents the accumulation of dried food, which can be really hard to clean. To reach tiny crevices, an old toothbrush can help.
Weekly tasks
Weekly tasks are tasks that are slightly less urgent than daily tasks. To avoid losing all of Saturday playing “catch up” on the weekly tasks, combine a couple of different weekly tasks from the cleaning checklist with daily cleaning duties. Examples of weekly tasks that should be on your cleaning checklist include:
- Cleaning countertop canisters (eg for tea, coffee etc), decorative stands (mug tree etc), dish rack, drip tray, etc.
- Wiping out the refrigerator shelves and the top of the refrigerator with an all-purpose cleaner
- Taking a toothbrush to the trapped gunk found in the seams of the large appliances and behind the kitchen sink
- Wiping down the cabinet fronts and handles with the proper cleaning product.
- Pouring boiling water down kitchen drains to kill bacteria and mould growing beneath the rim
- Scrubbing the kitchen bin with a disinfectant
- Dusting for cobwebs around the walls and ceiling
Monthly cleaning checklist
Certain kitchen cleaning tasks just don’t need a lot of cleaning and can be saved once a month. Again, these monthly tasks can also be worked into your daily cleaning schedule, with large tasks be spread out over several days if necessary. Your checklist of monthly kitchen cleaning tasks might include jobs such as these:
- A complete wipe down of the inside of the refrigerator and freezer
- Cleaning the oven (if you do this every month it will never get too bad!)
- Washing kickboards, painted wood doors, shelves, and other painted surfaces
- Washing windows and window sills
- Washing & polishing light fixtures, doorknobs, and drawer handles.
- Using a wood cleaner on any wooden kitchen furniture eg dining table.
- Cleaning the inside of the kitchen drawers and shelves with a disinfectant and relining with shelf paper (if needed).
- Cleaning and mopping the pantry, reorganising messy shelves, and throwing away old, outdated food
- Running cutlery trays and organizers through the dishwasher or handwashing
- Taking a toothbrush to all cracks and crevices in the kitchen (including grout) to remove buildup gunk.
Yearly tasks for the cleaning checklist
Keeping on top of the daily, weekly, and monthly tasks means that yearly tasks can be kept to a minimum. The yearly tasks my staff used to do were along the lines of
- Washing the walls and ceiling
- Pulling out floor appliances and cabinet drawers to clean the floor and walls in these hard-to-reach places
While this kitchen cleaning checklist may seem intimidating, it’s really not as bad as it seems. In listing all the jobs it takes to keep a kitchen clean and then breaking those jobs into manageable time frames, you’ll discover that keeping the kitchen clean really isn’t that time-consuming at all. When it is done regularly you never feel you have to do a “big clean” as it just stays nice throughout the year! Whenever you have visitors it will make your home always look great!
