And In the Fourth Round Focus Cleaning, 2026

[Harriet]

Here's our Current Thread!
You're in the right place to chat and easily find each other in (approximately) the same rooms through 2026. Everybody's waving from their porch at the same time, or in their kitchens at the same time, etc.

( UNLESS - they might be decluttering ahead in the upcoming week's room for easier cleaning! )

For chatting in current time this year, our current thread will always be FIRST in the line-up of topics in the forum. Our FOURTH round's calendar is in this post. The locked sticky threads about Focus Cleaning are just below, including the full 2026 Focus Cleaning Calendar for planning.

A consistently clean home is within reach! It's not that we need to clean everything suddenly We only need to clean CONSISTENTLY throughout the year we know that. Focus is Forgiving! It gives us ONE idea for an already-complete plan of rotation to keep us on track and keep each lovely area from neglect. We don't have to re-invent the wheel, just roll along with the one we have at the ready, a week at a time.

Here's a space to chat about our fourth rounds through our homes, which will be from today through the week of Monday, October 26 . Eleven rooms/areas for eleven weeks. Change the room or area names around to suit your home, record them in personal record-keeping if you want, in whatever form you like, and let's go through the house again!

If you are on a different plan for cleaning, please chat with us anyway, okay? We'd love to hear what you are doing through these months. To find some reminders and tips about rooms, check out the locked thread titled, "Clickable - The Eleven Focus areas and their How-To-Clean Notes". The contents listing there allows us to click on a room/area and go right to those Focus notes. (So does the Maintenance thread)

For quick reference here, our fourth round will find us :

Round 4
8/17/2026 porch/entry
8/24/2026 bedrooms
8/31/2026 bathrooms
9/7/2026 office/other room
9/14/2026 closets
9/21/2026 laundry
9/28/2026 storage
10/5/2026 outdoor
10/12/2026 kitchen
10/19/2026 living room
10/26/2026 dining room

[blessedw2]

thank you d harriet - I come here to focus myself and my card file - thank you thank you!!!

[blessedw2]

I think I am going to hire my landscape guy to wash the walls - especially the basement. I could do it myself but I have other things to do. I would like to get this done before the holidays.

he is also going to put up my christmas light soon.

copying my check off here.
"Round 4
8/17/2026 porch/entry
8/24/2026 bedrooms did some
8/31/2026 bathrooms
9/7/2026 office/other room
9/14/2026 closets
9/21/2026 laundry
9/28/2026 storage
10/5/2026 outdoor
10/12/2026 kitchen
10/19/2026 living room
10/26/2026 dining room"

[Harriet]

Little announcement I posted in Decluttered Home about Focus

A special Anniversary! Today marks a dozen years of having the Cleaning Focus Forum available to us in our ORGANIZATIONAL TOOLS AND SKILLS section of our board. First thread is always just the calendar, then "About", with the reasoning being working all year long a little at a time to keep our homes clean, the brainchild of our Indiana, as she says "several years" before. Then her cleaning notes. Then the fourth thread for explaining an important feature: "Maintenance" weeks, which allow for minimal cleaning in the time before and during the traditionally busy time beginning with Thanksgiving, US and going through New Year's Eve.

[Harriet]

Goodness, YES, blessed, do delegate when you can. Glad also that you have a plan for lights.

for me, this round:
Porch - mostly emphasizing plants aspect of front entry outdoors now - it won't be like this much longer
BUT today I noticed, from a different angle, the back porch windowsill (looking into my kitchen from a lower porch) had fingerprints in the dust there, which isn't okay. I don't mind that someone perhaps tried to look in, maybe hoping to visit or just waiting for us to get to the door - could be grands. But to think they came away with dusty fingers. Ugh. Tomorrow I must get back out there and go over that.

Bedroom - a problematic corner decluttered and cleaned, which was really a whole lot more than it sounds.
Also moving some furniture allowed extra floor cleaning when I didn't expect it
This is not over yet, lol. I need to get back to the rest of the room during this round - noticing some dust, and one lightbulb out

Bathrooms - deep cleaning in the smaller bathroom today
It's a hard room to clean per square foot, because it is tiny and you are super cramped to work on floors, for instance.
More I could do - it is a utility bath, BUT would look nice enough for company with new quarter-round molding along the bottom of the baseboard. Baseboard is nice, with a top trim like the rest of the house, but after ds re-floored several years ago, no one ever put the bottom quarter-round back. Hmmm... could I do that myself? Enlist HRH pretty-please, lol? We don't have a miter box, but they can be cheap, I think. it's not special cuts.

[lucylee]

I am always so far behind... or basically, not doing the zones at all... Can one fall behind when one doesn't start? hmmm...
I need to be doing the porch, but it is just sooo hot out there right now.

LAST YEAR, I bought stain for my rockers and porch swing.

Y'all tell me what I need to do --
The swing is hanging by rusty chains, so I am thinking at the very least, I need to rub down the chains with WD-40?

The rockers are wood, but the seats are cane.
Do I just go over them with sandpaper and then stain them?
Should I stain the seats as well, or is that going to make a big mess when someone sits down? Will the stain do well on that cane seat?

I'm going to say I did SOME in the bedrooms, because I finally noticed, while helping search for dgs' phone, that there were a LOT of Cheerios under the bed!!! Don't judge. I vacuumed those up, and I put the little straps on his bottom sheet so maybe he will quit tearing the bed clothes all apart when he sleeps in there.
I haven't done anything extra in the bathrooms or the master bedroom.