SCAMP—The Cleaning Routine That Changed Our Lives

SCAMP! That means Speedy Clean After Meal Party. (I stole that name from another blogger by the way, because we all know that I am not that genius. Lol.)

So here’s the deal. I despise cleaning. Loathe it. Hate it. Dread it. And keep putting it off until I can’t take it anymore. BUUUT…I also enjoy a clean house…ESPECIALLY now that I for real know what it feels like. Ha!

In the past, my motto was if it’s picked up, it LOOKS clean, and that’s enough for me. But the dust bunnies under the beds and night stands, on top of the fridge, on the lamps and on those pesky stair spindles rear their ugly heads at me every once in awhile letting me know, “Hello! I’m here, and I know I’m driving you crazy even though you don’t want to admit it.”

Uggh! I wish I could just hire someone already to get all this cleaning done that I can’t ever seem to get to.

But that’s not happening so…

I tried everything. I tried the Clean Mama method where you do one house task each day of the week. But, let’s be real. When she says dust on Tuesdays, you better believe I’m only dusting flat surfaces and will not be getting to ceiling fans, washer and dryer, back splash, baseboards, under beds, under nights stands, in closets…well you get the picture. Bare minimum. Whatever at least LOOKS clean.

I’ve also tried the clean the whole house one day a week method. But I’m always in such a hurry that basically only the floors and bathrooms get done. Maybe a little dusting if I’m lucky. I mean, who really wants to spend 8 hours in one day cleaning every single thing in their home. Can’t do it. WE HAVE A LIFE TO LIVE PEOPLE!

And don’t even get me started on Spring Cleaning. ARE YOU EVEN KIDDING ME? Just the thought of spending a week cleaning all of the things that typically get passed over and are extremely nasty because they’ve been sitting there for a year since the last time. GROSS.

I digress.

I want a clean home, but I don’t want to spend every spare moment cleaning nor do I want to pay someone else to do it for me.

What SCAMP is and How We Do it

And then I was listening to a mother/daughter duo talking about SCAMP. This was when she (the mother) would assign a specific task or room to each child for a season and they’d get the house tidied up after every single meal. They’d set a timer, play some music and work hard and fast for 15 minutes only.

Enter LIGHTBULB MOMENT!

What if I take this same idea and use it for doing all the little unwanted tasks that I never get around to or put off because I either don’t see them or they’re just plain yuck?

15 MINUTES IS NOTHING! I can clean for 15 minutes. I can do this!

And get this…15 minutes a meal is actually 45 minutes a day. And 45 minutes a day, minus Sundays, is actually 4.5 hours a week! Take that 4.5 a week and multiply that times 2 people (because this is family effort between me and E) and we got 9 hours a week baby!!!!!

Wait what?!?!

We are currently cleaning our home around 9 hours a week, give or take. Haha! I’m literally cracking up because this is the first time I’ve done that math. Wuuuuuut?!

The greatest thing about it is that it really feels like NOOOOOTHING. 15 minutes…THAT’S IT!!!! Take that Mr. Elephant! (You get that right? Eat the elephant one bite at a time…)

Make Your cleaning List

The next task was to make a list of everything I could think of to clean…EVERYTHING.

Things like cleaning our Dyson vacuum cleaner. It’s relatively easy, but that’s one I put off constantly…because it’s gross. And I have to pull up a YouTube video to make sure I do it right.

We broke every chore down into about 5 minute tasks so we can knock out several in one fifteen minute time chunk. It’s awesome this way. Trust me. Instead of “clean bathrooms,” we have it split up into several different chores. Clean toilets. Clean bathroom mirrors. Clean bathroom vents. Dust bathroom baseboards. Clean bathroom light switches and handles. Clean tub. Clean bathroom floor. Clean sink. Dust TP and towel holder. See that? Clean bathroom is overwhelming. Clean bathroom vents? That’s nothing!

Implementing Scamp (It will change your life!)

I just wrote all of our chores down on a piece of printer paper and cut them up. You could get fancy and print them out or someone else even suggested writing the chores on popsicle sticks so they last longer. (I might do that once our papers wear out.)

After our chores were all written down and cut up into little papers, we threw them in a jar and just got started.

I explained to E what we were going to do. (I also told my husband about it, but he’s not usually home for SCAMP. He sometimes helps us in the evening if he’s home.)

I told E, if you have an attitude about cleaning, I’m adding five minutes. (But it’s seriously hard to have an attitude about 15 minutes.) If you don’t do a good job on your chore, you get an extra one. (Note, I did not tell my husband that. Lol.)

And that’s that. After every single meal, we set the timer for 15 minutes, play music (our favorite is the Happy Cleaning Song from Enchanted), pick a chore out of the jar and bust it out. Once we finish one chore, we pick another, and another until the timer goes off. We can usually get through about 3 or 4 chores each. We set our “done” chores aside until the chore jar is completely empty. Then we add them all back in and start the process over. (It takes about a month to get through all of the chores this way.)

Our goal: WORK HARD, WORK FAST, WORK HAPPY!

Sometimes I absolutely do not feel like doing it. But I know it’s only 15 minutes, and it will be over with before we know it.

When I first wrote out our list, I missed some things. As the weeks go on, I just add a new chore as I think of it. For example, today, I just added outside windows (split up into smaller chunks of course.)

It takes us about a month to get through all of the chores.

This means two things. Our home is pretty much always clean…ceiling fans aren’t dusty, cobwebs aren’t hanging down from the corners, the top of the fridge is clean, no food splashes are above the stove, the microwave isn’t nasty. You get it. And two, since we are doing all the cleaning so often, it’s not super gross to clean.

It’s just been amazing. And take that from someone who despises cleaning!

Our Cleaning Tasks for SCAMP

A couple notes before we get started.

I try to clean anything that gets gross often at least once a week or day or as I notice it. For example…the toilets. I try to do them every Monday during our morning SCAMP. That way they are getting done more than just the one time during SCAMP. Alternatively, I could add them to our stockpile of chores a few more times. I might do this since sometimes I forget to clean them on Mondays.

One of us always washes the dishes and sweeps the floors before starting into any other SCAMP tasks so the kitchen always stays tidy. Sometimes, especially after dinner, the kitchen is such a mess, that everyone works in there the entire 15 minutes.

E will often make daddy’s lunch as part of our evening SCAMP so that we don’t make a mess in the kitchen AGAIN after cleaning up. (Go in the right order! A lazy-genius principle.)

Anything on E’s morning chores are not added to the SCAMP list. This would include emptying bathroom trash.

Ok. I think that’s everything. Here are our tasks that we do as part of our SCAMP routine.

(These tasks are created specifically for our own home, so there may be some things that do not apply to you. However, there are many cleaning tasks that are the same for everyone across the board, so I’ve created a printable version for you with extra spaces to fill in your own tasks. Hopefully this will save you some time if you are looking to create your own list. I know it’s not pretty, but that’s because this is meant to be a work horse for you. Let me know if you need a pretty version to hang on your fridge. Lol.)

Find the PDF version here and the Word version here.

Hopefully I’ve answered all of your questions, but if not, feel free to leave more below.