Cleaning tasks left for another day have a habit of growing into monstrous, time-consuming messes. Use a cleaning schedule to makes sure your messes don’t grow into Saturday-slaying monsters. Photo by Todd Baker.

Looking at your house after a long day at work and seeing it as a giant nebulous project that you’re shamed into completing is disheartening. If you have a schedule set up to tell you what gets cleaned and when, you’ll know that there are only a few things that need to be done each day to stay on top of the housework. At Re-Nest, the household-centric blog, they’ve highlighted the daily cleaning routines from Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan’s book The Eight-Step Home Cure. There are daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly schedules. From the daily schedule:

1. Make bed
2. Wash dishes.
3. Put clothes away.
4. Sort mail.
5. Clear answering machine.
6. Clean all kitchen surfaces
7. Take out full garbage.

You can adjust the schedules based on the needs of your household. Maxwell’s suggestion to vacuum, sweep, or mop all your floors once a month would be fine for a single person without a lot of traffic through their home, but in a household with multiple pets and children, you can bet you’ll need to vacuum the high-traffic areas with more frequency. If you’re all for the cleaning schedule but you’ve got company coming over tonight and no time for the deep cleaning, make sure to check out how to fake a clean house to get by until your new cleaning schedule has worked its magic. If you already use a reasonable, crafty cleaning schedule, we want to hear about it in the comments below!

Make a Cleaning Schedule [Re-Nest]

Swagbucks.com is a search engine that offers you the chance to win cool prizes every time you perform a search. I’ve been a member for… oh about 15 minutes now and have already racked up 3 swagbucks. Well, to be honest they give you 3 swagbucks for free when you sign-up. But anyway…

A guy in my office says he scores about 12 swagbucks a week on average that he redeems into Amazon.com gift cards. Those $5 gift cards cost 45 swagbucks, so basically he’s earning $5 a month just by routing his normal google.com search queries thru swagbucks.com. This is pretty good for a light searcher that he seems to be. I’ll report back in about a month’s time with my own personal tally.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of prizes up for grabs in the Swag Store. They have books, albums, electronics, collectibles and many more categories to choose from. If you just can’t find something you want, do like my buddy did and redeem into gift cards, and there’s a bunch of those to choose from as well.

Oh yeah, and to make thing alot easier, you can install a browser plugin that makes swagbucks your browser’s (Firefox FTW) default search engine. Can’t get any easier than that.

Swagbucks.com

Livekick, the Kayak-like concert recommendation and tickets search engine, has emerged from private beta. Founded by the entrepreneurs who started Grouper.com (which was bought by Sony in 2006), Livekick, which we originally reviewed here, helps users discover live concerts in their geographic vicinity and purchase the cheapest available tickets. Livekick’s current search engine includes more than 75,000 concerts in the U.S. from more than 20,000 artists at close to 40,000 venues.

LiveKick asks you for several pieces of information before recommending concerts. First, the site requires you to add you location. Second, the site tries to gauge your musical tastes by allowing you to select your favorite artists by name, or by importing artists from your iTunes library, computer music library, MySpace Music, Last.fm, Pandora, iLike, blip.fm or Rhapsody accounts. Livekick creates a musical profile based on your favorite artists and will automatically import new artists that are added to playlists and music services.

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Why pay to water your plants during dry days when, in most locations, more than enough rain falls right on your roof? Photo by madmack66.

Rain barrels are a time-tested way of collecting water for reuse. Runoff water from your roof, which normally flows onto your lawn or down your driveway and out into the street, is collected in barrels and used for watering your lawn and garden in the ensuing rain-free days. Still, why would you want use rain water instead of just cranking open the spigot?

Frugality blog FiveCentNickel highlight several reasons, including:

Using rain water will reduce your water bill. If you have “city water,” you pay your municipality for supplying the water based on your usage level. If you have “well water,” you pay for the electricity to run your water pump.

By the same token, since most utility companies bill your sewer use based on your water use, you’ll stop paying sewer fees for water that ends up in your yard instead of your sewer. For more reasons to use a rain barrel and tips on building your own rain barrels, check out the full article at the link below. If you have a rain barrel or cistern—the hulking big brother of the rain barrel—at your house, tell us all about it in the comments.

Save Money (and Water!) With Rain Barrels [FiveCentNickel]

Microsoft this morning announced that it is rolling out Bing Travel, one of the verticals it’s focusing much of its attention on when it comes to the recently unveiled “decision engine” the company set out to conquer market share from Google and Yahoo Search. Bing Travel, as we mentioned when we posted the first screenshots based on the Kumo preview, combines a lot of the airfare and hotel reservation tools from Microsoft’s 2008 acquisition of Farecast with news and other editorial content from MSN Travel (in fact, travel.msn.com already redirects to the new search engine).

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