Spring is the perfect time to refresh and rejuvenate your home after the winter months. The garden is coming back to life, and it’s becoming warm enough to open the windows and let in some fresh air.
With the help of our handy checklist, you can manage your household and keep everything clean, organized, and operating smoothly.
Spring Household Maintenance Planner for Working Moms
As the old saying goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” However, it’s easy to forget or put off home maintenance if you don’t have a list of what to check for and a method for keeping everything organized. One survey found that 68 percent of homeowners don’t have an annual home maintenance checklist or routine.
Completing your annual spring-cleaning is easier with an “organize my house” checklist and some prioritizing in advance. In fact, there are a variety of tools out there to help busy moms plan and schedule household tasks. They include:
Apps such as Trello and Asana
Home management books
Free printables for home organization
No matter what method you use to prioritize and schedule your home maintenance to-dos, consider adding the following items to your checklist:
[Related: ]
Exterior Repairs and Maintenance
Check for damage to your home’s exterior, including the foundation, siding, roof, and gutters, and identify vendors to help with repairs.
Inspect caulking around doors and windows and reseal as needed.
Identify any areas of pest or insect damage and schedule a preventative or remedial exterminator visit.
Spruce up outdoor spaces by cleaning patio furniture, power-washing decks and walkways, and testing exterior lighting.
Begin cleanup of lawn and consider hiring a professional landscaper for pruning, mulching, and garden planting.
Clean out the outdoor grill and firepit.
Schedule lawn irrigation system startup and annual testing.
Schedule pool opening.
Interior Decluttering and Maintenance
Do a walk-through of each room and determine what needs to be reorganized.
Donate or sell items you no longer need.
Identify furniture and furnishings in need of repair or replacement.
Deep-clean carpets and reseal wood floors as needed.
Clean windows, drapes, and other upholstery to remove built-up dirt and allergens.
Dust surfaces throughout each room.
Test and replace batteries in smoke detectors and carbon monoxide alarms.
Organize garage and storage spaces as needed.
HVAC, Plumbing, and Appliance Maintenance
Schedule a professional inspection and cleaning for your HVAC and plumbing equipment, including:
Furnace/boiler
Chimney interior
Septic and well systems
Sump pump
Water softener
Dehumidification system
Replace HVAC air filters and clean heating/cooling vents and returns.
Inspect faucets, toilets, and pipes for leaks and signs of damage and repair as needed.
Clean and descale dishwasher, washing machine, and other appliances to maintain efficiency.
Replace refrigerator water filters as needed.
Run an oven self-cleaning cycle.
[Related: ]
How Pepper’s Personal Assistants Helps Busy Moms
Keeping up with household maintenance can feel overwhelming. And if you’re managing household chores, childcare, and your career, you may be like many moms who feel even more stretched. In one survey, 93 percent of moms reported feeling burned out.
Thankfully, there’s hope. At Pepper’s Personal Assistants, we understand how hectic your schedule can be as a working mom, and we’re here to help you plan and organize your lengthy to-do list. One of our highly skilled household assistants can help you easily tackle your spring checklist, so you get it all done and have more time for the people and things you love. From organizing clutter to scheduling maintenance appointments and supervising repairs, your assistant can handle it all. (You don’t even have to be home for it to get done).
If your wife is responsible for raising the kids, managing the household, or working outside the home, she likely has far too much on her plate. Not only must she handle the day-to-day of a never-ending to-do list, but she also has to carry the mental load of making sure it all gets done and on time.
However, the overwhelmed mom in your life doesn’t have to manage these tasks alone. You can do a lot to support her and ensure she doesn’t feel responsible for making everything happen.
Why Overwhelmed Moms Need Support
Parenting comes with many challenges for moms and dads, and it’s not always easy for either parent. But moms often bear much of the responsibility for parenting and household management—even if they’re also working a full-time job.
A Gallup survey of married and cohabitating couples found that despite women making up nearly half of the workforce, they handle most of the childcare responsibilities and nearly all household chores except car maintenance and yard work.
Moms are often responsible for:
Managing kids’ activities (homework help, school pickup and drop-off, play dates, and so on)
Scheduling appointments
Performing household chores, such as cleaning, meal prep, and laundry
Shopping for groceries and running other errands
Organizing family events and vacations
In any given week, full-time working moms can quickly become overwhelmed. They must keep up with laundry, cook, and manage a cleaning schedule to avoid being paralyzed by a messy house. They also carry the mental load of all the behind-the-scenes work that keeps everything running, such as:
Managing the household calendar
Anticipating child and household needs several days and weeks in advance
Evaluating the pros and cons of childcare and household decisions and making those decisions
Monitoring household operations and child-related tasks and stepping in when things don’t go as expected or new tasks come up
For many women, this constant mental juggling can lead to stress, exhaustion, and resentment, which can negatively affect their mental health. A CVS Health/Harris Poll survey found that working mothers have been diagnosed with anxiety and depression far more than the general population (42 percent versus 28 percent).
[Related: ]
Ways to Support Stressed and Overwhelmed Moms
With the mental load of all their household and childcare responsibilities, it’s no wonder many overwhelmed moms are also becoming frustrated. In a 2023 Skimm survey, 64 percent of women agreed with the statement, “I am tired of trying to be a super mom, super wife, and/or super employee.”
The pace of life and all its responsibilities are unlikely to slow down, but here are some ways to take the pressure off your wife to be “super” everything:
1. Acknowledge and show empathy for how she’s feeling.
Often, people struggling in any area of life want to be heard. If your wife feels stressed, overwhelmed, or burned out by the mental load of childcare and household chores, listen to her concerns and show her that you care.
You can do this by:
Assuring your wife that her struggles are valid and understandable
Reassuring her that feeling overwhelmed is not a sign of failure
Reminding her that she’s not alone
2. Lighten her mental load.
Multiple studies have shown that women carry more of the mental load of childcare and household duties. While there are many causes—societal expectations, unequal division of labor, and others—it’s better to focus on possible solutions and what you can do to help.
Here are some ideas:
Talk about it: Discuss what you can do to help take some tasks off her plate.
Share accountability: Recognize that helping isn’t occasionally taking on a task. It’s taking complete ownership of something from start to finish, so she doesn’t have to worry about it.
Encourage her to delegate: Help your wife understand she doesn’t have to do everything herself. When she does delegate, be consistent in your support and show her you can be relied on to follow through on your commitments.
3. Get help from a household assistant.
Outsourcing household chores helps overwhelmed moms cross more off the household to-do list without doing it all themselves. With a household assistant, the busy mom in your life also gets more time to spend with family and other passions.
A household assistant can perform tasks such as:
Laundry
Grocery shopping, running errands, and making returns
Paying bills
Making and rescheduling appointments
Supervising repair technicians and taking deliveries
Planning family travel and other activities
Become a More Supportive Partner
There are only 24 hours in a day, and busy working moms shouldn’t spend every minute of it planning, organizing, and performing household tasks. With your help and partnership, you can lighten the mental load of managing childcare and household responsibilities, giving your wife more time for family and self-care.
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
]
