I need a longlist of all chores in a household

[fisha]

@Maastricht

I don’t know a better solution. I’ve got four options, and they are all awful, impossible, or both.

1. Divorce. I’ve told him I’m unhappy and overworked and he just hopes for my skies to clear. And I can’t force him to move out and it probaby wouldn’t improve the situation anyway, for either of us.

No good answer, but wouldn’t be my first option.

2. Stop making a problem of it and just do most of it. He does electronics and his fair share of child-rearing. And he cooks occasionally. I do EVERYthing else.
   Comfort myself with the thought that he probably does other things I don’t notice., ( but we can’t talk about that without a list). Trying to tell myself that a spouse can love and yet somehow that that love doesn’t need to materialize as pulling his weight. Telling myself that yes, I do have enough energy to keep this up for the rest of my life. I don’t.

One of the things we women do really badly is separate love and typical man behavior. “If he loved me, he’d buy me flowers randomly. If he loved me he’d remember my birthday. If he loved me, he’d pick up his own dirty laundry.” I hate to break it to you, but they are NEVER going to show you love the way you want all the time. NEVER. Let it go. You’re not giving in, you’re just accepting your crazy reality. So, you have to figure out how he does show love. And appreciate it. This will help your relationship. My husband shows love by running to the store in the middle of the night because I think I need a candy bar, or the newspaper. He does it by washing my truck. He does not show it by leaving his clothes on any available horizontal surface.

I think the first thing that would help is to evaluate your home on it’s own. Decluttering and simplifying can make dramatic permanent improvements on your workload. We moved last year from a 5,000SF house to a 2,000SF house for the sole reason of simplifying and looking to the future on upkeep and flexibility for traveling. It’s much easier to clean and deal with.

3 Talk about it. We do, occasionally. Maybe once in a forthnight. It does clear the air. The clear feeling seldom lasts more then a day. Results with regard to the actual chore division is spotty at best.

Yeah, they feel bad, but nothing changes. Eventually you’ll turn into a harpy, and it’ll be like listening to their mom yelling at them to clean up their room. I’ve found trading sexual favors for chores works well. Win/win. (if you do it in a positive, fun way.) If you can’t do that, it might be a sign of lingering resentment.

4. Stop caring about my chores. I can’t. I do care.

I know. This sucks and there is no easy solution. In perfect world, they would just automatically do it without being asked, or have to fight about it, or just be a responsible adult that picks up after themselves. I know I haven’t given any good solutions, but when I read your idea of weighted lists, it’s going to make you crazy, and then not only are you going to be arguing about chores, you’re going to be arguing about the list, too. Madness.

5. Running away, alone, with my belongings tied in a red kerchief dangling on a stick over my shoulder, skipping over a sandy road, against a setting sun, and starting over somewhere else under a different name.

Simplify your house, simplify your life, so that you are only doing what your level is. Anything he does beyond that is pure gravy.

[elbows]

I think you need to take a different direction towards the change you’d like to see. Why not start from scratch?

First you each volunteer for three tasks. These should be the tasks you don’t mind managing, suit your schedule or nature, etc.

Next, you each get to assign the other three tasks. The tasks you hate the most, (and would most appreciate someone doing for you!), you get to push onto the other! But, remember they get to do the same!

Now each has six tasks to manage, half they don’t really find too onerous. And the knowledge the other is doing the three tasks you really hate.

And twelve things are getting done!

Who knows? Maybe suddenly people will start feeling appreciative of the other, for doing those tasks they really don’t want?

I don’t believe the list/scorecard is going to get you what you want, in my opinion.

Good Luck!

[Sunny_Daze]

My husband was raised by a hoarder (sit with that in combination with this next bit). A hoarder who spoiled him rotten with the notion that his wife would “straighten him out.” She used to criticize me whenever I thanked him for something like taking the trash out.

So, he just doesn’t care about the things I care about. He’d be just as happy (maybe happier) with piles of his stuff on every surface so he could “find” everything.

I would like everything put away. I can’t stand clutter. I can’t stand mess and dirt.

I also realized a loooong time ago that my marriage would be a battleground every day if I couldn’t accept some basic things about him. So I do the bulk of the housework, and the bills, and the shopping, etc. I just value my overall relationship with my husband more than the arguments. Now that we have more money, I have housecleaners. I’m looking into grocery delivery services. Where I can “outsource”, I will.

Before we could afford some of this help, I just sucked it up. If it bugged me, I did it. Why? Because it was my pain point, not his. If I didn’t have the energy, it didn’t get done. And, guess what, we survived that too.

You need to decide which is more important to you - this mythical equality about things on which you will always have a differing opinion, or your marriage.

If you need time off, take it. You don’t have to go full bandana on a stick, just take a day or weekend to yourself from time to time. Get your nails done. Go read a book in the park. Hide in the Library. Whatever re-charges your batteries. If you can’t get equality on the chore list, you can at least take care of yourself. It sounds like you need a “mental health break”.

[fisha]

I am a hypocrite, it could always be worse. If you want to feel better, I will list my reality at the moment.

Moved into a not quite completely remodeled house a month ago.
Still have boxes laying willy nilly in every room.
Husband almost cut off his hand with a table saw, so hasn’t been at 100%
Dr’s, surgeons, therapy.
Typical 150 MPH kid stuff
One counter is a piece of plywood.
Not all the walls are painted.
Two out of state trips to lose a total of 12 working days this month.
HVAC need vent covers.
Master shower needs light fixture
No towel racks, no toilet roll holders.
No hood on the stove.
Dump trailer in the front yard.
Unable to park in the garage because of tools and boxes.
Need closet organizers in almost every room (hence boxes willy nilly)
Cabinets in kitchen need to be organized-food and utensils are in there, but not in proper places.
Floor is filthy from construction traffic
Shoes are in a pile by front door because mudroom lockers are half installed.

Sigh. We are making progress every day, but we’re not done yet. This list hasn’t made me feel better, but hopefully it’ll help you. Remember, it could always be worse.

[Moonlitherial]

@Fenris

There’s no-one who can assign points except the two of you because some chores are personally worse than others. I don’t enjoy, but don’t mind scrubbing the toilet, say, but hate doing dishes or dealing with laundry out of the drier (fold it? hang it up? just leave it in the drier until it’s needed?). So I’d assign like 10 “this job sucks” points to dealing with clean laundry, but 2 “this job sucks” points to cleaning the toilet and maybe 5 points to rinse the dishes and load the dishwasher. I suspect I’m in the minority here.

@elbows

I think you need to take a different direction towards the change you’d like to see. Why not start from scratch?

First you each volunteer for three tasks. These should be the tasks you don’t mind managing, suit your schedule or nature, etc.

Next, you each get to assign the other three tasks. The tasks you hate the most, (and would most appreciate someone doing for you!), you get to push onto the other! But, remember they get to do the same!

Now each has six tasks to manage, half they don’t really find too onerous. And the knowledge the other is doing the three tasks you really hate.

And twelve things are getting done!

Who knows? Maybe suddenly people will start feeling appreciative of the other, for doing those tasks they really don’t want?

I don’t believe the list/scorecard is going to get you what you want, in my opinion.

Good Luck!

I think Elbow’s solution is going to be the only thing that will save you from the reality of Fenris’ answer.

I’ve been married over 20 years now and we’ve had this ongoing issue with chores the entire time. We’ve tried a million solutions but there’s always someone who feels they’re getting the short end of the stick. The closest we came to even was when we both hated the solution.

We’ve managed to get to the point where we know that we each have a couple sticking points and we work to avoid each others. I hate that every horizontal surface becomes a collection point for “stuff” so I’ve put baskets in a couple of key locations and the deal is - when the basket is full you have to empty it not pile stuff around it. He hates other peoples food, so I scrape and load the dishwasher and wash anything that needs to be hand washed. About half the time he empties the clean ones so bonus there.

We each do our own laundry, although somehow I still get all the sheets and towels, and we pay the lovely Elizabeth to come every two weeks and save us by cleaning floors, bathrooms, baseboards, and actually making the sink shine.

He still complains about the fact that it takes me longer than he’d like to make phone calls or write letters to deal with service issues and I hate the fact that there is a corner of the basement that I lovingly refer to as the spot the tools explode into, but you’re never going to resolve all the differences, the key is to find a level that you can both live with.

Good luck!

[iamthewalrus_3]

A while ago, some roommates and I used the Chore Wars game to track our chores. The most important thing we got out of it was that everyone was underestimating the amount of time other people spent on chores. This makes sense, because you’re present for every grueling minute of your own chores, but if you’re off doing something else, you’re just not going to notice the chores other people are doing.

So, I suggest, before making a list and dividing it, you log what you are doing, and your husband logs what he’s doing chore-wise. The list should simply be the task and the amount of time spent on it.

Once you have the list of things that you actually do you can make progress toward what you’d like. And hopefully you’ll see that even if your husband isn’t doing his fair share, he’s probably doing more than you estimated. Also, you’ll get some Hawthorne Effect gains just from the log, so that’s something

[LC_Strawhouse]

Sorry, I don’t have a list either. But is it possible that your aesthetic vision of how the house is supposed to look like (if the chores were all done correctly) is not being made clear?

Instead of a list of chores, maybe you could start by showing or emailing him a whole bunch of sample photos of your preferred living environment … and you could each use your own methods/ingenuity for achieving it.