Cleaning & Organizing
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
House-Sharing & Chores
My husband and I currently share a house with two of his mates. We've been in this house for over 7 months but haven't had an effective way to deal with cleaning and unfortunately as the only girl, I end up doing most of it! Any advice or ideas for our situation? Thanks!
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Re: House-Sharing & Chores
My H and I have different ideas about cleaning too. We've had to find a compromise of both doing more housework (to make him happier) and lowering his expectations of what the house will look like all the time (to make me happier). He had a SAHM, and I'm away from home 55 hours a week, so it's not going to be the way it was when he was growing up. So first decide what sort of compromises you'll have to make. Their standards may just not be as high as yours, and as the one with lower standards in a living situation, I don't think I should have to bust my ass to do anything beyond basic cleanliness if I'm OK with basic cleanliness (which you have to define as a group).
In order to share in the "basic cleanliness" standard, the thing that has worked for us recently is we have a chore checklist on the fridge modified from Martha Stewart's web site for daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal chores. This works for us because even though DH is the one always complaining, he does very little cleaning. So now when he opens his mouth I just point at the checklists on the fridge and tell him to pick something and clean it and shut his big mouth. I hope the fact that my initials are next to 85% of the checked off chores shames him a little
You're in a worse position though if you are the one doing all the cleaning and doing the complaining. If you think they would care or start to complain if you started letting things go, it would probably work better.
Have you considered all pitching in for a cleaning person to come in monthly? For people with very different standards, I think it's a good solution if you can swing it. That way the higher standard person gets some help, and the lower standard person has to buy some replacement labor.
Have you considered all pitching in for a cleaning person to come in monthly? For people with very different standards, I think it's a good solution if you can swing it. That way the higher standard person gets some help, and the lower standard person has to buy some replacement labor.
This is what I was thinking. Get an estimate from a cleaning service, tell everyone that weekly cleaning will cost $$, and each person's share is $$. Don't want to pay, then here is the list - pick 1/4 of it. If the other 2 don't want to take their share and pay instead, and you want some extra cash, there you go.
Remind them you are not their maid and you are not their mother and that this is an equal opportunity house.
We made a list of everything that needs to be done around the house, including the frequency, amount of labor required, and the approximate duration of the chore. We then divided up the list.
Since I'm a SAHW and full-time student, and my H works 60+ hours each week and goes to school part-time, I end up with the majority of the tasks. That's fair. We're both putting in an equal amount of time.
There are some things that H likes to do that I just can't stand, like vacuuming. There are other things I'm better at, like laundry and loading the dishwasher.
The list stays on our fridge, so there's never any doubt about who was supposed to take out the trash or clean the litter box. It's also easy to check to make sure we didn't forget to do something.
That being said, as soon as I graduate and go back to work, we're hiring a cleaning service.
"I wish I could have sparkly tits every single day of my life." --MUNI
I'm going to jump in and say that making a chore chart for adult roommate is a bit... infantalizing? I had a roommate who did that, mostly so she could yell at us if we didn't vaccuum the living room exactly on Wednesday. So don't do that. With a spouse, if that works best for you, go for it. But don't assign chores to people weekly, please.
Perhaps just make a list (together) of things that need to be done to the house daily, weekly and monthly. Personally, the big monthly projects, like deep cleaning the fridge or washing the curtains, are probably going to fall to you, because you are going to care the most. Those are also not necessarily things that have to be done to make the house look presentable, they're just things that have to be done every so often to make sure the house stays clean. IME, having the list is a great reminder of how things need to happen.
Are you guys all home at the same time? Can you institute an hour on the weekends to dedicate to cleaning the house together, and have people pick what they want to do?
I'm assuming you're mostly worried about the common areas. Bedrooms and private bathrooms aren't really your responsibility (although I wouldn't be happy if one roommate was letting mold grow in his shower). Can you get a set of baskets and just pile random things that get left in the living room in those baskets, so that the common areas look picked up and then your roommate can just take their own stuff and put it away at their leisure?
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