We solved it by never, ever, running out of bulbs. That way no-one has to ask any-one to REPLACE anything.
We would fight over the last slivers of soap. I wanted to toss them and she wanted them stuck to the new bar. Which never worked for me, the thing kept sliding off and was a chore.
Eventually we ended up with two separate soap dishes for the same kind of soap. Yet I still had to “avoid waste” by saving my slivers. I promised to eventually “when it amounted to a dollar’s worth by weight” grind the slivers into soap powder to wash the car. Never have reached a dollar’s worth.
A lot of nagging in our household has been replaced by Outlook reminders.
For instance, I sent him a recurring event-invitation for putting out the trash. He accepted it, and now Outlook reminds him every week, even on his cellphone.
I’ve done the same for myself with tasks like watering the plants, replacing the vacuum dust bag and decalcifying the washer.
Another solution was a cleaning lady, gotten through Craigslist.
Also, a clear division of labor. He does everything with our baby son; if he wants me to do something, he has to ask me. I do everything concerning our house, and most of the arranging and organizing. If I wnat him to do something, I ask him.
I find that to work best. When my husband still did “his” share of the housework, he did, in my opinion, very little and way too late, and took way too much credit for what he did. It was more annoying then doing it myself.
These are no longer minors - I guess you’d call them “boomerang” kids, who’ve left home and then come back. One has finished college and the other has a community college degree. Hopefully they are only temporarily back home until they take flight permanently. 
This is going to sound bad on my part, but here goes. My wife had some bad ttendencies she picked up from her mom and dad. Her dad usually insisted on doing things the hard way, and her mom shared his perfectionism. She’d do over stuff he had done, because they weren’t just right.
I got tired of these habits in my wife. I told her, if she insisted on redoing my work, there was no point in my doing it at all. If she edited, the job was hers from then on. That was years ago. After a while, decorating the Christmas tree was her job, planting and maintaining the flower beds was her job, buying gifts was her job, and on and on. She got the point, finally. She agreed to accept my work, without editing. So, we went back to a fair division of labor.
I would load the dishwasher. Some how it just wasnt “right”…so not only would it get rearranged, it would be in the hour or two before it was time for me to get up. That noise would wake the dead. I have always had trouble sleeping, and the last hour or two are the ones that I finally get some REM sleep. I virtually never load the dishwasher now.
I didnt edge or weedwack the yard often enough (ie every damn time I mowed it). And the times I did do it did not result in a thanks, but instead a reminder of how “shitty” it looked when I didnt do it. I no longer do it either.
Any project that gets excessive bitching about how I am doing it wrong basically get walked away from. I can either do it or fight about it, but I sure as hell aint going to fight about how to do it as I am doing it.
Doesn’t sound bad to me. cwPartner is a perfectionist and an editor as well, and to a great extend I took the same approach you did. If he edited or re-did something I had started - unless something was objectively faulty, burning, dangerous, etc. - it became his job. He got tired of being responsible for doing everything because only he could do it “right,” and now I’m allowed to do most of these things without having him re-do them.
My husband didn’t train me out of this. I realized by myself that I was giving him negative feedback when I criticized his work or re-did it. I still grit my teeth over the way he loads the dishwasher, but I only thank him, unless he does something that actually is a bit dangerous, like loading the knives with the blades up so they’ll cut whoever tries to unload. He usually doesn’t do the dishwasher at all. He cooked dinner tonight, and instead of saving the potato peels to go into the compost bin, he put them in the trash. I didn’t mention this. He cooked, I’m glad he cooked, I’m not gonna hassle him about the potato peels. There will be more compost material tomorrow. I didn’t have to cook tonight, and he made sure that I could eat what he cooked by not putting pepper in it. And yes, I thanked him and praised the meal.
And how about learning how she wants to have it done, and then doing it that way?
Is it about the process, or the end result?
The end result, or course. And that is a good relationship with no mutual resentment (for bitching OR passing chores off to your partner), no passive agressiveness (she bitches, you sulk) and a fair division of tasks.
Or did you mean that your way of loading the dishwasher will make the dishes just as clean? Have you even asked her why she disagreed? Maybe it is important, for instance, to put all the clean stuff (glasses) on top and all the dirty stuff in the bottom compartment, that kind of thing.
I’m the other side of this in my marriage. From where I’m sitting HE’S arbitrarily decided that there is One Right Place for various Things. To him the One Right Place is natural and inalienable, while to me they are nonobvious and I’ll look in multiple places that are natural to me before having to ask him where the item is.
So, consult him on where things belong, and then he will be able to find them because it’ll be natural to him too, or it’ll be a decision made by both of you with some thought behind it as to where something should go. The not putting things away is really a separate problem.
Our most recently resolved solution regards the air conditioner in the car. We used to continually struggle over the knobs. We got a car with a seat warmer. With the seat warmer on, I can tolerate a lower ambient temperature.
With us the car radio and heater are the property of different people. Whoever touches one first cedes the other. On long trips, roles reverse at rest stops.
One running argument I have with my sister when we eat out. I always want to divide the check, in round terms, based on what we ate. She likes the largest lobster and two glasses of mid-list wine and I have cheaper coffee and salad. You know the rest.
I want to split checks with my brother too. He always wants one person to pay. But he’ll try to call it at the end. Which I think is the opposite of treating. After we split a small pizza and soft drinks he’ll say “my treat, you can pay next time”, and I’ll say “I wish you’d told me at the start and I’d have ordered more”.
I always pay more. It wouldn’t chafe so much except they each earn three times what I do.
We had a running argument over fussing with the shower curtain to prevent mildew.
We solved it by that method of putting a price on it.
She wanted me to keep the curtain wide until it was dry and then bunched up to let the tile grout dry. We couldn’t spray it with mildew remover because it would bleach out and was expensive to replace. I wanted to keep it bunched up because that’s how it is to get in and out of the shower and that also lets more light into the room.
The solution was to buy new, cheap shower curtain “liners” that we could spray, and replace it whenever they no longer cleaned easily. The fancy curtain stayed outside the tub and never got wet.
We discovered a trick after the first time we tried to work on a project together, which ended when both of us were pissed at the other because we had different thoughts on how to do it.
From then on, any project around the house (repair, building something, etc) is assigned a project manager, and it is understood that the PM has final say in all decisions. The other can be an assistant, and can be asked their opinion - but all decisions are ultimatley made by the PM.
Usually projects naturally fall to one person or the other - oftentimes based on who is the one who recognizes something needs to be done.
It works great.
The other thing we’ve done - when trying to whiddle down a list of options to one we can both agree on (where we are both largely ambivalent) is that one person narrows down to 3 options they are ok with, and then the other picks the one of the three. This works for things like choosing dinner, naming a pet, etc.
For a while we had a Job Jar like they do in some comic strip families. On Saturday you each draw an equal number of chore slips and can put one back.
We stopped talking to each other, learn to live with seathing resentment and I drink.
Not the best “solutions”.
I’m hiring a cleaning lady. He thinks that’s ridiculous, so we snit at each other about the cleaning lady.
Reminds me of my first job, in junior high, where my brother worked Saturdays in the garden while I was the “house boy” who did all the cleaning chores that required rubber gloves or knee pads. Clean the fireplace, scrub the tile floors, swab the basement floor, polish the silver. I thought she was just trying to get even for hubby’s spending money on the garden instead of doing his own mowing. They both spent the day drinking in separate rooms.
Anyway, here’s a good problem solved http://imgsrv.gocomics.com/dim/?fh=e6e093aa84b04ce75ee7db83b4735a90