Student Cleaning Guide and FAQs | Random Task Allocator

Check out our top FAQs that’ll help you keep your student house clean. Our student cleaning guide and random task allocator are perfect for helping you figure out the best ways to divide up cleaning jobs and know what jobs need to be done on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

What is a cleaning rota?

A cleaning rota is a way of rotating different jobs between those living in a shared house. Though keeping your property clean might seem like a daunting task at first, using a cleaning rota allows you to segment a home into individual rooms and tasks that can then be allocated from person to person. Getting into the habit of doing certain jobs on a weekly basis means that when it comes to a monthly deep clean, there really won’t be that much to do.

Our downloadable cleaning rota templates will allow you and your housemates to easily and fairly allocate jobs in just about any form of shared accommodation. Our random task allocator does a similar job. All you have to do is enter your housemates names and a list of individual tasks, before each task is randomly assigned to a different housemate.

What information should a cleaning rota contain?

A good cleaning rota will contain a list of tasks and how often they’ll need doing. You could have different cleaning rotas for different timescales, such as a weekly cleaning rota and a monthly cleaning rota. If your rota is formatted in a table, then you’ll also want a blank column that you and your housemates names can go into, so everybody knows what their job is for that week/month. We’ve listed some of the most common weekly and monthly tasks below.

What should be cleaned weekly?

Some of the tasks that are worth doing on a weekly basis include:

• Washing any bed sheets, towels and bath mats
• Dusting any surfaces and hoovering all floors
• Mopping any hard floors
• Cleaning the bathroom, mirrors and toothbrush holders
• Bleaching the toilet
• Cleaning the inside of the shower
• Cleaning the inside of the microwave

You can use our task allocator or weekly cleaning rota to fairly divide these jobs between yourself and your fellow housemates.

What should be cleaned every month?

Tasks that you do the least frequently tend to require the most effort. Here are some of the cleaning jobs that we’d recommend doing every month:

• Deep cleaning the fridge
• Cleaning the inside of the oven
• Wiping down and dusting any internal paintwork
• Deep cleaning your mattress (this can be done using a vacuum cleaner and bicarbonate of soda)
• Washing your pillow and duvet (if you aren’t doing this every week, then make sure to at least wash them every month)

You can use our task allocator or monthly cleaning rota to fairly divide these jobs between yourself and your fellow housemates.

How do you equally split household tasks?

Our random task allocator and cleaning rotas are the best way to ensure that all household tasks are equally split. All you have to do is keep rotating the jobs, as this will mean that everyone has a go at every job – even having to clean the dreaded toilets!

What is a good schedule for house cleaning?

The most reliable way of keeping your house clean is by sticking to a cleaning schedule. To begin with, identify all the rooms of the house (don’t forget about the outdoors), the jobs that need doing in each and how often they need doing. Our cleaning rotas can help with this. You could also make a list of cleaning supplies and assign them to individual housemates. This will help avoid certain people buying way more or way less than their fair share. 

Once you’ve listed all jobs and how often they need doing, it’s just a case of putting them all into a cleaning rota or our random task allocator. What could be simpler?

How do I keep my housemates accountable for chores and jobs?

If one or two housemates shirk their work while everyone else puts plenty of effort in, then there’ll likely be some arguments and annoyance between the two camps. To avoid this, you should make a list of the jobs that need to be done and have these jobs alternate between each housemate.

Once you’ve all moved in, it’s important to discuss what ‘clean’ actually means. Having everyone work towards the same standard is another surefire way to avoid confrontation. Creating a Whatsapp group for your house (if you don’t already have one) can be used for communication and splitting out the cost of cleaning supplies.

Using our random task allocator or cleaning rotas are a great way to ensure that every housemate knows what their job is and when it needs doing.

Already sorted your house but need to set up bills? We can help with this too – we set up and split utilities for you. Get a free quote for your utilities here.