Last week, the chattering class moved on from talking about Sandberg and leaning in to talking about division of house cleaning chores. (See Jessica Grose, Jonathan Chait, and Stella Bugbee.) I didn't weigh in, because we've dealt with that topic so many times on this blog. A sloppy search of my archives pulled up dozens of posts. However, I've been getting nudged to write a post about it, so here goes…
Having a tidy house isn't totally worthless as Bugbee makes out. If the kids have clean socks in a designated drawer, it is easier to get out them of the house in the morning. It's easier to throw some waffles in the toaster, if the counter isn't strewn with the remains of the previous night's dinner party. There are obvious benefits from having the cabinet under the sink stocked with rolls of toilet paper.
I speak from experience here, because right now Jonah's clean clothes are stacked in front of his dresser and are not actually in his drawers. The kitchen counters are piled high with a mix of clean and unclean platters and bowls from last night's dinner party. And the upstairs bathroom does not have any toilet paper.
Having a clean house is a nice thing. But making it clean is super boring, and in our spoiled Western world, we have so many better things to do with our time.
Steve and I used to quarrel more about the housework than we do now. In some ways, quarreling over housework is a young person problem. By the time that you've been married for a million years, an equilibrium develops and standards change. I have learned to ignore the chaos on the top of Steve's night stand and desk. And he's recognized that it's actually gross to have a kitchen so dirty that you can see a dead cockroach in the digital display of the microwave.
Like Chait, I do more of the housework, because I'm home. But I do not accept that housecleaning is my job. I do more, but I consider it a temporary situation and a low priority task. I got a headpiece for the phone, so I tidy up, while chatting with my mom. I watch dumb TV shows, during those rare moments when I try to squeeze the mountain of folded laundry into our cramped, hand-me down, paint-encrusted dressers. (I do think that if we ever invest money in proper furniture, the house will be tidier.)
When Steve's home, he does a fair share of a certain type of housework. During the week, he cleans up after dinner and throws in one load of laundry. As long as we have a mutually agreed upon priority list for the weekend, we're conflict-free. It would be nice if there was some recognition that the workload for the house was not evenly distributed, but we'll let that one go for the moment. He does many chores around the house that I don't touch, including the bill paying.
Not only is housecleaning is a worthless task, but quarreling about the housework is also a complete waste of time. After fifteen years of marriage, we have nearly reached an equilibrium point. It took a long time for each of us to make adjustments in expectations and to arrive at certain patterns. I'm glad we're at this point, because there are so many better things to do with your time. Keeping score about the house cleaning is just as boring as putting away the platters from the dinner party and keeping the bathroom stocked with toilet paper.
Apt. 11d 
And he’s recognized that it’s actually gross to have a kitchen so dirty that you can see a dead cockroach in the digital display of the microwave.
It’s hard to find, buy you can still get a microwave with an analog display and thus producing no light when not running.
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My husband believes that it is more time efficient to clean up the next time you use the kitchen rather than cleaning up immediately afterward. There are a lot of obvious problems with this theory (i.e. the next person to use the kitchen probably won’t be the person who left a mess), but 1) he eats very rarely and 2) he does the dishes practically every night.
The big kids have just gotten to the point of fixing their lunches for school and making simple snacks. Getting them to clear their dishes and clean up the kitchen afterwards is the next step.
In the meantime, there is some utility to everybody else’s kitchen habits. It enables me to figure out exactly what was happening in the kitchen in my absence.
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the next person to use the kitchen probably won’t be the person who left a mess
That isn’t a bug, it’s a feature!
I take comfort in keeping our house tidier than my parents’. It’s important to choose realistic comparisons!
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squeeze the mountain of folded laundry into our cramped, hand-me down, paint-encrusted dressers. (I do think that if we ever invest money in a proper furniture, the house will be tidier.)
Oh, this is SO true. Once I stopped thinking we had to keep using the “antique” dressers out of respect for my ancestors, and opened my wallet to buy appropriate furniture, including bookshelves, tidying became a lot easier.
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I had long, bitter chore wars with my husband but it took our son saying that cleaning was “a mummy job” and then he shaped up really quickly. My strategy eventually (after the years of arguing and dramatics) was just to do it myself…I hated it but it probably saved our marriage.
In not-entirely-coincidence because all this has gotten my team interested in the chore wars we are running a chores survey at my pro site; I linked my name to it if anyone is into answering. You have to be a residence of Canada to win the prize though.
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Chore inequities seem like the most common target of projection related to some other dissatisfaction in the relationship. Righteous anger because your spouse hasn’t cleaned the toilet in the seven years you’ve lived in your current domicile is a lot easier to communicate than your feeeelings about some other part of the relationship that is less tangible.
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We hire a housecleaner. We pay a lot and don’t get great work (a lot of folks ask me, because, generally, when they pay they want an excellent job done on their house). She does not the “hard stuff” but just the general maintenance. We pay too much for it, and need to work on getting better cleaning, but, it keeps the house from falling completely apart without arguments.
Our “wars” are over clutter. Useful furniture is a good thing, but the pants won’t fit, ever, if everyone keeps everything. I am kind of bad, but everyone in my family is worse, especially the xy folks in the house.
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Our “wars” are over clutter.
If you figure out how to win that war, please let me know. I’m close to starting a small fire and hoping that smoke damage will be sufficient.
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Outsourcing is definitely the way to go – makes life so much easier. We have a great cleaner – even does laundry for us. She comes every other week, so I do some light cleaning in between because my expectations are different than my husbands – which is fine because it’s not much work now. I know it’s a total 1% option, but if you can manage it, SO recommended.
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I will be outsourcing housecleaning as soon as my oldest starts kindergarten in the fall. It has been a dream of mine for many years and it will be realized as soon as I only have to pay for child care for one child. My question is: how do you find someone good? Everyone I know who has a housecleaner seems to think theirs is not very good.
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Well, my solution is that you have to decide what’s good. In our case, we prioritized dependability and trust. We are also very bad managers and don’t want to manage. We are willing to spend money though, without worrying very much if we’ve gotten the best quality.
So, you have to decide what “good” means to you. Do you want your house to be cleaned *better* than you would clean it (things like cleaning tops of cabinets, baseboards, behind the faucets, . . . )? Do want the cleaner to do the same job you would do? How much are you willing to communicate about what needs to get done and then verify that it has been done? How neat is your house? (our house is not very neat, which means, for example, that our cleaner sometimes cleans a dining room table that is covered with projects, which, frankly, means she doesn’t clean it).
We have tried a cleaning service, in which the supervision is provided by the service and not us. The house gets much more thoroughly cleaned. The cleaners in this circumstance are not necessarily consistent however (we have one person who comes to our house every week; with the other service 3 people come, and the service chooses who); the service is expensive (though not more expensive for how much more they do); the cleaners do not generally speak english.
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So, to get a good housecleaner, I think the bottom line is that you have to come up with a project/work description (services sometimes post list: http://www.maidbrigade.com/how-much-are-house-cleaning-costs), communicate that work clearly to the individual, and then supervise the individual in doing the work, giving performance reviews and then getting rid of cleaner if you do not like the work. And you have to pay them well enough that they’re willing to put up with what you want them to do. It requires the skills of being a boss to a potentially challenging employees.
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Shannon — clicking through your name, I see you’ve lived in China? but, presumably, aren’t there now? I’d also love to hear insight on how one gets a good housecleaner, from someone who has a good housecleaner.
(as opposed to my guess about what one would need to do to have a good housecleaner, when I don’t).
I think my issue is that I want a housecleaner who will just do what I want done without my having to manage/or communicate with them. We briefly had such a person, amazing guy; but, as one would expect, he did not stay in the job long.
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“That isn’t a bug, it’s a feature!”
I talked to him after I posted and pointed out the problem.
With four of us using the kitchen, things could get nightmarish very quickly without frequent maintenance.
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MH,
Three moves is as good as a fire, they say.
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“My question is: how do you find someone good? Everyone I know who has a housecleaner seems to think theirs is not very good.”
I used to have a Portuguese mother-daughter team in DC. I still miss them.
I miss my OCD Texas cleaning lady, too, but as I’ve posted here before, after she went to jail for threatening somebody with a weapon, I had to look elsewhere.
I’ve gone back to the services. I’ve never had a service I was thrilled with, but I feel like we’re getting our money’s worth. It’s worth it when I see crud to think–the cleaners are coming in three days, I don’t have to think about this.
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But much more work. Plus, between paying real estate people and the transfer tax and movers, we’d be down at least 8% of the value of the house. Probably 12%.
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Let’s not forget the kids. They need to work, too. This past year (after we moved into a place where each big kid has their own bathroom), I presented each child with a Clorox Toilet Wand set and refills.
http://www.clorox.com/products/clorox-toilet-wand-system/
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In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I had about two weeks of bedrest last year, followed by a couple months of physical restrictions, followed by three months of gestational diabetes and immobility, and my husband and the kids really pulled together and did very well (with the help of twice a month cleaners and university dining). I went literally months at a time without setting foot in a grocery store. It was often rather suspenseful whether the kids’ school uniform items would be ready in time to avoid a uniform infraction, but things went surprisingly well.
I was just reading this thread from Catholic Answers, which just gets worse the more information the poster provides:
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=768663
(I comment there as Xantippe.)
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We have a housekeeper too. I agree with bj about the necessary management skills. Based on both newspaper articles and personal observation, I think a lot of women are too conflicted about these issues to be effective managers of household help.
My wife and I have wildly different interests when it comes to housekeeping. She is mostly concerned with general tidiness and achieving a superficial presentability every day, whereas I tend to like deep cleaning projects (like taking down the chandelier and cleaning each glass piece with ammonia and alcohol) and the stuff my wife considers “frou-frou,” like decorative napkin folds. If we were two guys rooming together, this might result in a happy, effortless division of labor, but relationships between the sexes are usually too fraught to permit that outcome. However, the housekeeper eliminates most occasions for argument.
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Yes – we’re back and haven’t been updating the blog with mundane details of our life here in the US. But to the important topic – how to find a good house cleaner? Ask around. As far as I can tell, none of the big services are great. But we found friends who had cleaners, numbers posted on boards in restaurants, etc. We interviewed a couple and then went with one that our neighbor recommended. She is in such high demand that we paid for her during our year abroad (for our renters!). There was NO way I was coming back to a) having to house clean again, and b) having to wash and fold my sheets (because really, no matter how many tutorials you read about folding fitted sheets, it never works right).
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We had house-cleaners work for us for a few years but my partner lost full-time employment and we had to scale back. I miss those days!
Thanks, JennG, for the survey link. I like it when we Canadians get a chance to enter contests!
Have you see Emily Shire’s short piece over at Slate about how women are judged more regarding the cleanliness of their homes? Even when the mess is clearly the work of their male partner’s? That, I think, is an enormous part of the reason why this matters more to women – because we are blamed for these things (and almost never credited, even when everything’s great) – http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/03/25/why_women_clean_more_than_men_because_they_re_judged_for_the_mess.html
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We had a house cleaner for a while as well, and I’d love to go back to it, but it’s expensive. I do all the housework for the most part, including paying bills. I go through phases of having high standards followed by months of not caring. Mr. Geeky and the kids do the dishes, walk the dog, take out the trash and recycling, and laundry. It’s semi even. The one thing that bugs me is folding mr. Geeky a clothes. I’ve been known to go on laundry strike. It’s not quite lysistrada bur . . .
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Most of the chains will provide a trial clean if you ask — at a discounted rate. That way, you can try a couple of services and see what you like.
We have one of the services and are very happy wit them.
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scantee,
I think that is true. My ex and I fought over chores all the time, and it turns out that what made chores so contentious was a microcosm of what made our relationship not work on many other levels. There was a moment I considered leaving my ex over the dishes, or a fight about a sponge which led to him not speaking to me for three days. At the time it felt so horribly petty, but in retrospect I can see that it was never really about the sponge or about the dishes (and actually I should have left him then, but hindsight is 20/20). I’ve lived with my current partner for over a year and we’ve yet to fight about chores once, even though he is Italian and raised by a mother who mostly waited on him hand and foot, so he isn’t exactly proactive about helping out.
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