(no subject)

[waterspyder]

Question:

To people who live with a significant other or a roommate... how do you handle the chore arrangement?

Comments

[feli-valkyria.livejournal.com]

cristofcanada and I are practically living together even though we're not technically doing so ;)

I get him to mostly do the dishes and washing the floors (they are a pain). I am responsible for the tidying up and the laundry.

[twiin.livejournal.com]

Everyone does what they can, when they can.

[andifferous.livejournal.com]

I live with roommates, we practically live our own lives, we all do our own homework, cooking, cleaning of our rooms, dishes, laundry. Often Suhaib leaves a mess and Sameen and I just work around it. There are things like buying milk and such we take turns on. Also each month we have a cleaning week where one of us is responsible for kitchen, one for bathroom, and one for living room/hall. We each rotate on those duties. The chore is supposed to get done in that week (doesn't matter when). For things like shovelling we are taking turns (though I think I will end up doing most of it). For garbage Sameen and I were doing it for the first while, but now Suhaib is doing his fair share of taking the garbage out.

[waterspyder.livejournal.com]

I'm jealous LOL.

It sounds like you have that worked out. I think I miss Jennifer.. the girl washed dishes compulsively. I'd cook dinner, eat dinner and come back to the kitchen to find out she had already washed the pots and pans I'd used to cook. You can't pay for that sort of efficiency.

[waterspyder.livejournal.com]

Does it work out well, or do you find that sometimes things don't get done as often as they should?

[kali-kali.livejournal.com]

Things are going fine in a "if it needs to be done it'll get done" for me and oni_neko. She tends to do more dishes than I do, but I'm also home a lot less. Though the more people there are living in a house, the less likely it is for a live-and-let-live situation to work, as we found in the gamer house.

[simply-fiendish.livejournal.com]

Had chore issues in the past with roomies, back in the dark ages. :P
Depending on where and who I was living with at the time, we had chore charts or a choir jar. Whatever choir we pulled out of the jar we could not return to try for another. We put up and shut up with what we pulled out.
Helped a great deal with keeping us organized since we all had crazy lives and weird work hours.
Now the kids are older, making more of a mess and can do more, I am going to be setting up the same sort of thing for the whole family now. They need to learn responsibility, cooperation and I am tired of being a maid. *L*

[xliquid-dreamsx.livejournal.com]

When living with a man I've always found a mutual cleaning day where all the chores are shared to be good. Some how when these things are part of your together time it doesn't seem to be such a struggle. Daily stuff like picking up after ones self is just a given in my book. Although I'm not so anal that I freak if I have to pick up someones towel or anything. As for cooking/cleanup/grocery shopping I guess I've always just lucked out and had a man who wanted to be part of it. I don't mind doing the majority of cooking alone though... long as no one complains when I don't feel like doing it. Big Big thing for me is that I will be totally pissed if someone messes things like the kitchen up and doesn't do their own clean up. I'm no ones slave... and if I start to feel I'm being treated as such then 9/10 times you're gonna have one pissed off me in your face telling you about it.

Real funny thing for me is that right now.. with my family in the house with me.. I was having issues. There wasn't enough time in my day to do the weekly cleaning stuff in addition to the tidying up stuff. So I now have a cleaning fairy that comes once (or twice if need be) on my days off. She mainly does the floors the bathroom and the dusting. Anything else I want done I either leave a note for or tell her if I'm around when she arrives. Because she is family.. my aunt.. all of a sudden my father now makes sure he is picking up after himself. It's a sibling rivelry thing that seems to be working in my favor! An added bonus is that she went to him and said she didn't feel right about taking my money... the family thing added to her knowing how hard my health issues makes this kind of thing for me.. makes her feel like she should be helping me for free. Long story short she doesn't mind at all taking my fathers money from him and so he's now paying for her. =) =) =)

[waterspyder.livejournal.com]

LOL... brilliant move on getting your aunt to come in.

Maid... maybe that is the way to go on this.

I just don't have enough time anymore with fulltime work to clean as often as I need to do it...

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

#1: Since we tend to share meals, one person cooks, the other cleans up.
#2: If your cat made the mess, you clean it up.
#3: You keep your own area clean.
#4: Whoever fills up the garbage can empties it and replaces the bag. Carrying it out to the dumpster is done by the next person to leave the house.
#5: Everything else is done by taking turns, as it needs to be done.
#6: If you start a job, finish it. Never do *half* the dishes or vacuum *half* a room.
#7: If chores start getting unbalanced, the slacker takes the person doing the work out for dinner some night.

It works pretty well. We're both *messy* and have stuff all over the place, but it's not dirty.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

#3b: You will have your own area, or the two of you will kill each other. Doesn't need to be a bedroom. Can be a desk, or a room corner, or something. But have it.

#8: Time spent alone on chores that benefit the household as a whole is time you get to spend doing whatever the hell you want later. This is informal and unarticulated. It is also rigidly enforced, as anyone (SO, roommate, or not) who attempts to convince me to do something I'm not in the mood for after six hours of struggling with window screens will get their head bitten off.

#9: Keep light cleaning supplies (Lysol, Windex, paper towels) handy. You're much more likely to do a spot clean if the requisite stuff is "over in the corner" not "down the hall, inside the cupboard, behind the dish soap", and spot cleans help.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I'm enough of a clean freak that stuff being in a separate location just slows me down.

[waterspyder.livejournal.com]

I like rule #7...

[torrain.livejournal.com]

You'll clean something up even if you need to go to the other end of the apartment to do it, so it doesn't matter.

Me, it makes the difference between cleaning now and cleaning later.

[panthertriad.livejournal.com]

Having lived with over 40 people, here are a few things we've done.

With Nat, we basically waited till things got really bad, and then devoted a single afternoon to completely cleaning the house. Since this was okay with both of us, it worked.

In my Nepean house, the first time, we basically set up a rotating schedule, so that one person would do dishes, another sweep floors, a third dust, a four clean drains and bathroom, and fifth would ummm.. not sure.. THIS didn't work out very well, cause people would forget, and others wouldn't do theirs till someone else did theirs... bad idea all around.

2nd round in nepean house, was everyone did their own dishes, and once a week we all pitched in an hour(there we six of us) to clean on the weekend when everyone was free. This worked better. It also helped that we got a dishwasher, cause no one liked doing dishes, even if it was their own.

With rez, we had someone to do our floors and such, but kitchen duties, we basically ran on a do it now, if it's still there after 24-48 hours, without a good excuse, your dishes get given to charity.

I'm gonna agree with liquid dreams on this one.. Do it at the same time as he does it. Gives him a chance to see he's not cleaning alone. (also, pick up a sub/slave that likes doing housework.)

[kali-kali.livejournal.com]

FYI on the maid idea, from someone who has worked in maid service: If you go with any of the companies, it is EXPENSIVE. Even for an apartment. Not to mention they value speed over quality. And they don't usually do dishes. One of the issues I had when working with them was that I valued quality over speed, which always annoyed whoever I was working with.

Hell, hire me, and I'll do it for a less than a third of the price a professional maid service would charge, as long as you already have the cleaning supplies. And it'll be done better, because, again, I value quality over speed.

[corradus.livejournal.com]

Put simply, if all the people don't want to do the chores, you will be stuck with some people doing them and some not. All the schedules and arrangements on earth won't make unmotivated people do their chores.

Now having said that, if everyone IS motivated to do the chores (or will at least do them if harrangued long enough) then all you need to do is make a rotating schedule - like your old high school timetable....Make a list of the chores, divvy them up, set them on rotation so no one has to do the same thing for too long and then away you go.

The other trick, when it is time to do chores EVERYONE should be doing them barring fire, floods or acts of God. It is really demoralizing to be doing chores and someone else watching tube during it.

Thassmyadvice

[torrain.livejournal.com]

> Maid... maybe that is the way to go on this.

If you're looking to go that route, I know Lorraine will clean for hite. And she's good. 'minds me, I need to get her drywalling stuff back to her...

[waterspyder.livejournal.com]

Lorraine was pretty good... I had her come and help me with my last apartment. She also got to bear witness to my miraculously inept roommate at the time... I think people were starting to question the accuracy of my stories until other people got to see it first hand.

I think she explained that she likes cleaning other people's apartments because it is not her own.

[twiin.livejournal.com]

(I only got the LJ notification for this comment today)

It works out pretty well for the most part. My roomate and I have an understanding that if one of us talks to the other about house-things, it's not to be taken personally at all, and it's just house-things.

So if I'm working a lot one week and I feel like something isn't getting done as often as it should, it's a real non-issue to mention it, and it gets done.

Previously, though, I had a lot of trouble with roommates who would take every house-thing raised as an attack against their character, or some such.