I know that this is a kind of gentle, good-natured mock rant, but being the up-tight literal-minded geek that I am, I have decided to treat it entirely seriously. Since I live by myself, some of these will be how I do things, and some will be specualation about the general business.
1. Who is responsible for putting a new garbage bag in the garbage pail?
Definitely the person who took out the garbage. However, this just pushes the question back one step to who is responsible for taking out the garbage. In my family the rule was the same as on “The Simpsons”. Whosoever puts something in the trash that cannot somehow be coaxed into staying on top of the pile must change bags.
2. Who should recycle the empty cereal box?
All my cereal comes in bags, but the person who uses the last should throw it away.
** 3. Who should clean out a tin can for recycling?**
The local recycling center takes aluminum, cardboard, newspapers, telephone books, and two types of plastic bottles. Tin cans are thrown in the trash.
**4. Who should clean the toilet? **
I’ll address this one later.
5. When should laundry be done?
Clothes: When it is no loger possible to make an entire clean outfit.
Sheets and Towels: Once a week.
**6. Who folds laundry? **
If you plan carefully, this can be avoided entirely. I have two categories of clothes: those I hang up (all shirts and pants) and those that I leave loose in the laundry basket (socks and underwear). Since wrinkles don’t show on the latter category, there is no need to fold them.
**7. Once laundry is folded, what should be done with it?
**See number 6. I do not own a dresser, as one is not needed. Everything is hung in the closet, or thrown into the socks-and-underwear basket in the closet.
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Toilet Cleaning: This belongs to the routine maintenance category of housekeeping, and was quite a cause of dispute for me and my SO back at the time that we cohabitated. Other things such as dusting, running the vacuum cleaner, making the bed, mopping the kitchen floor, etc. fit into this category.
SO would constantly complain that she did all of the housework of this type. I was perfectly willing to do this work; I did it before her, I did it after her. We just had different ideas for how often these things should be done, and her schedule was always more often than mine. For example, I vacuum the rugs once a week. She vacuumed every day. Had the rugs ever gone unvacuumed for a week, I would have vacuumed them. But she never let the rugs get to the point where I thought they needed to be vacuumed, so I didn’t vacuum them.
Likewise toilet cleaning. I use those blue tablets in the tank, and these keep the toilet bowl pretty clean. My schedule for cleaning the toilet: Whenever it starts to get icky. Her schedule: every time you use the toilet. Because the toiled never got icky, I never cleaned it. Likewise, dusting, mopping, sweeping the patio, etc. I even offered her a compromise: she could have the guest bathroom all to herself. I would use and clean the bathroom in the master suite, she would use and maintain the guest bathroom, all bathroom related problems solved. She declared this solution stupid, but never explained what what wrong with it (except that it should be obvious).
The problem here was conflicting cleaning schedules. I did not expect her to change to my cleaning schedule of once a week or once a month for most things. I thought it unreasonable that she expected me to change to hers. She, of course, thought it entirely reasonable that I should change to her schedule (which she referred to as “sharing the work”). No matter how often I explained to her that I would be perfectly willing to do whichever housecleaning chores she designated for me, up to and including all of them, if I was allowed to do them on my schedule, she insisted that the house had to be kept by her schedule. If she insisted on cleaning everything every day, that was her choice, and it made no sense to blame me.
We even tried splitting the chores up, each cleaning according to his/her own schedule, which I thought would be the perfect compromise. After three days of not having the carpet vacuumed or the furniture dusted, she declared she couldn’t stand it, and did the work herself, then yelled at me for doing exaclty as we had agreed.
In short, she insisted on cleaning things that were already clean, and blamed me for not doing the same.
