We have relatives staying with us currently. This isn’t a problem, we have spare rooms and they’re pleasant people we normally get along with well. Also, it’s for a short/defined period – they’re spending about a week’s worth of vacation time visiting Boston and visiting various other nearby New England touristy draws. They eat breakfast with us, then head out for the day. Sometimes they eat dinner with us, sometimes they do dinner out and go to a concert or whatever, and finally crash back here. Basically the idea is that we’re saving them the cost of a hotel room and having little chats with them here and there. All perfectly fine.
What is driving me nuts is that the wife is convinced they need to ‘repay us’ somehow, not with money, but with ‘helping’ around the house. But she never asks what they can do to help us. Hey, we still have gardens to rake winter coverage off, we’ve got assembled piles of stuff that need to be delivered to Goodwill/the church/etc and that would be great to have help with.
Instead she looks around for things that “need to be done.”
So far she has rearranged my pantry shelves! And the dish cabinets! And the spice rack!
I had things arranged the way I liked and now I can’t find anything without playing hide and seek!
But I smiled at her and thanked her through gritted teeth.
Today I returned home from church to find she’d done me the marvelous favor of preparing a dinner for tonight. Great, huh?
Except she somehow managed to prepare a meal that took critical ingredients that were planned to go into four separate dinner for the next week! Aaaaargh! Now I have to go do another whole shopping trip or else figure out how to make stuffed peppers without green peppers and so forth.
Get out of my house, you miserable “helpers.” I’d much rather deal with do-nothing freeloaders who leave piles of rubbish and heaps of dirty dishes to wash!
That alone would make me homicidal. Also, note that she used YOUR food to cook dinner. Someone being truly thoughtful would have bought the ingredients to make a dinner (excepting basics such as salt, a few tablespoons salad oil, etc., of course). Not to mention asked you if it would be a good night for her to cook.
The problem is you need to nip that kind of behavior in the bud - but too late now, it has blossomed into a full-grown Titan Arum.
Your best bet is to blame yourself - claim you are super OCD and you know you’re weird, but … fortunately she did a nice job of everything she organized, but better not to do it in the future as it doesn’t always work for you when someone else tries to organize your stuff.
She’s over stepping her boundaries. I’d be pissed if someone rearranged my cupboards, and trust me some of them could stand to be rearranged. If she wants to show her gratitude, how about treating to breakfast or dinner? A house plant? A bottle or case of something? There are many unobtrusive options.
Yeah, that’s weird. And reorganizing your spice rack? That’s beyond weird. I would be soooo pissed.
Who the f*** takes your food and does stuff with it without asking. When I’m a house guest, i ask before i eat a piece of fruit. Who knows what your plans are. And usually hosts are helpful that way, and say, “here’s the milk, take as much as you want. Here are the fixings to make coffee/tea, this is where i keep the cereal, if you’d like to make yourself an egg, here are the eggs and the pan…” And i don’t touch anything that’s less of a staple than ground pepper that my host didn’t mention. And if they are running low on milk, or i want some fruit around that i can grab, i make a supermarket run and buy that stuff.
I think you need to say something. As you can’t go back in time and say something a few days ago, do it as soon as you can. You know them, and how to talk with them, better than we do. But my friend David is the only one i can think of who might possibly do shit like that. To David*, i would say, "thanks for trying to help out. I like my mess where i left in the house, but it would be awesome if you could deliver this stuff to Goodwill. " And there’s other stuff around the house you could help with, but please ask, first.
I’d offer Goodwill and not the gardening because he’d mess up the gardening in some way i can’t foresee. And I’d think really heard about what tasks he couldn’t mess up to offer him. Because he can mess up washing the flatware. (Although probably not so badly that i wouldn’t let him do it.)
Not the same David as they guy who makes awesome ice cream. I completely trust that David in my kitchen.
My family does this when emptying the dishwasher so I had to take it on as an extra chore. I still have yet to figure out if they put things away at random or where they would want it if they ever cooked (they don’t). Let’s start with basics fam, put the pyrex casseroles with the rest of the pyrex casseroles. Put the pans and skillets with the rest of the pans and skillets. Put the colander with the other colanders. You know, basics like that.
This happened to me once. I took a bunch of lemons to a friends’ weekend at the cabin to use in a meal I was going to cook. The control freak of the group move them to next to the alcohol. I said, “Hey, these aren’t for drinks so can you just leave them here (moved them)? I don’t want someone to use them by mistake” OMFG!! Everyone there was calling me the asshole because how dare I don’t let her put my lemons where she wanted.
My visiting family at least will ask where things go. Which breaks the other rule of helping, if you need to ask me more than two questions, you’re not helping, you’re just creating more work for me.
“Where does the big roasting pan you only use at Thanksgiving go?” No problem.
“Where do the plates go, where do the glasses go, where do the mugs go, where does the silverware go…” or the sometimes even worse “I didn’t know where that stuff went so I piled it on the stove” where it is now in the way, instead of in the dishwasher, where at least I could ignore it until I got the potatoes started.
When I was living in Chicago we had planted several raspberry plants in our yard which, over the next few years propagated themselves throughout the available space. Since Patti and I were both fond of raspberries (hence the reason for the original planting) we saw this as a great boon. For several years as they ripened I would go out after work with a bowl and harvest them for dessert.
Then one day I got home and the entire yard was cleared out. Not of the ripe raspberries, but of the plants themselves. We found out that a friend for whom we had done a favor (I cannot remember what it was) decided to “repay” us by clearing the “weeds” out of our yard. I managed to avoid killing her as I (relatively) calmly explained to her when she had done. She showed up a little while later with several pints of raspberries as an apologies.
Fortunately some of the rootstock survived the massacre, and the next year the crop began to return.
I’d probably have put the lemons, and myself, back in my car and departed.
It is amazing how many people want to kowtow to a contol freak. You learned some things about your other friends that day.
This is a bit close to home for me right now because my newish GF runs with a posse of about a dozen women. All of whom are in thrall to the two spoiled control freaks who’ve declared themselves joint queens of that realm. None of them can help themselves; the Queen barks and they all bow and scrape in unison. And they. Cannot. See. It. Until they’re away from the group then they call each other to commiserate about how outrageous Queen Sally was at dinner yesterday and how Megan and Sue were just taking it.
I think this is an example of how you need to use words to convey thoughts. Like, “I appreciate you trying to help around the house, but in the future I want you to ask first. Then I’ll be able to tell you if your idea for helping is okay with me. Can you agree to that?”
If that is too scary to do, you’ll just have to suck it up for now and never ever invite them again, and they’ll never know why.
I ultimately won the war. I was the only one to push back against her but than after a year or so, everyone else started saying what a bitch she was. No misogyny intended, that was the word the women in the group used to describe her.
I totally agree with this first part of your post. The OP needs to use their words. And speak truthfully, not lie to deflect the source of the problem onto themselves. Diplomacy is the art of telling people news they don’t want to hear. it can be done.
As to this part …
Good plan at first glance but I suspect that’s unrealistic.
If the OP is too scared to tell them to stop uncontrolled intrusive harmful “helping”, they’ll also be too scared to say “no” the next time these people want a place to stay for a week and call to ask = invite themselves. Because if the OP does get up the gumption to say “No”, the first thing the other person will say is “But why not?”
The OP will have far greater success stopping this now than later, and 3 days ago would be far better than yesterday which is far better than tomorrow. Gonna be tough to do retroactively, so tomorrow will have to do.
I would have torn this person a new asshole. I don’t care how valuable the family relationship is or about maintaining diplomatic relations. You do not fuck with my kitchen.
Also, I started a thread on a similar topic a year ago, in which I describe my mother-in-law trying to be helpful in similar ways, but eliciting more irritation than gratitude.
I don’t think theres a good way to do this at all.
Feelings will be hurt.
Extended family will hear of it.
More feelings nudged.
They were obviously using you for a hotel and stop off.
The food loss is not the thing, the actual intrusion into your private home/life is the problem.
Maybe let them go without saying anything.
Don’t agree to have them back. Ever.
My husband started bringing his hunting buddies to stay in my house during hunting season. We had a dorm room built just for that.
I didn’t care.
2 years in, I crushed their dreams of having a cleaning lady and cook on site. (beck and call ) and ended it. Very dramatically.
Caused all kinds of gnashing of teeth and hand wringing.
The next year they built a camp house.
They started talking to me when they realized they could be nasty and drunk and no woman was there to nag.
) and ended it. Very dramatically.