Student Cleaning Schedule

The student flat reality

Nobody moved into student housing dreaming of fortnightly mop rotations. But the alternative is a flat that descends into chaos by week three: dishes everywhere, fridge horror, the bin that nobody empties. A 10-minute setup now saves an entire semester of low-grade household stress.

The bare minimum that works

• Daily: wipe counters after cooking, wash your own dishes, empty the bin if it's full.
• Weekly: bathroom (toilet, shower, sink), kitchen mop, hoover common areas.
• Monthly: fridge clear-out, windows, behind-the-couch reality check.

How to make it actually happen

Pick one weekly clean-day (Sunday morning is classic). Print the schedule. Stick it on the fridge. Use WhatsApp summary to drop a reminder in the flat group chat. The chart removes the awkward "whose turn is it" texts forever.

Student-house realities the chart respects

Student houses run on irregular schedules — late lectures, shift jobs, exam weeks where everything stops. A standard Monday-to- Friday rota fights all of that. Build a 1- or 2-week rotation where the chore is "yours" but the day is yours to pick. The chart names the owner; the owner names the time.

Why a written rotation beats a verbal agreement

The single biggest predictor of household cleaning conflict is not how tidy people are — it is whether the agreement is written down. A printed chart on the fridge converts every "you didn't do the bins" argument into a five-second glance: either the chart says it was your week, or it doesn't. The chart is also harder to gaslight than memory.

Rotate weekly, not daily. Daily rotation creates handoff friction (who empties the half-full dishwasher?) and erodes any sense of ownership. Weekly is long enough to feel like "your" job for the week, short enough that the unpleasant tasks come back to everyone in turn.

The post-night-out exemption

If the chart says you do the kitchen on Sunday and you've been out until 4am Saturday, swap with anyone willing — but the swap is the deal, not the exemption. "I'll do it Tuesday" is a contract, not a hope.

How fairness is calculated

Behind the scenes, every chore gets a numeric weight from its effort (small / medium / large), frequency, and a difficulty modifier for the genuinely unpleasant tasks. The algorithm distributes weight across people, not chore counts — three counter wipes do not equal one toilet scrub, and the schedule respects that. Annoying tasks rotate separately so the same person never gets the bin two weeks running. Full details on the methodology page.

FAQ