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How to get the housecleaning done?

I live with my wife and two young kids. I am by far the most organized and I do most of the tidying up. My wife and older son are pretty bad, they just don't seem to understand the idea of putting things away! It bothers me, and I do get frustrated regularly, but I've learned to live with it and not snap at anyone. I struggle with being assertive and asking for help. I've had bad experiences when I try to be critical of others. We do hire a cleaning crew to come once a month and clean all the surfaces, but that's not that significant compared to all the daily cleaning I do. Almost any path from point A to point B in my house throughout the day includes picking up and putting things away opportunistically.

On the other hand, my wife handles a lot of things I don't. She calls it emotional burden, which I've listened to her about and learned about. For example, thinking about gifts to buy others, thinking about what the kids need, planning outings, thinking more about daily logistical details, etc. And I've tried to help with these types of things more.

So I've come to a view of relationships in a way that certain things will be very unequal, but on the whole, if both are putting best efforts forward and helping where they can, that is a pretty good place to be.
 
patrick183 said:
On the other hand, my wife handles a lot of things I don't. She calls it emotional burden, which I've listened to her about and learned about. For example, thinking about gifts to buy others, thinking about what the kids need, planning outings, thinking more about daily logistical details, etc. And I've tried to help with these types of things more.
Click to expand...

I so relate to that part of your post. The only person I have to remember cards, gifts, social needs of is my wife. She takes care of everyone else and it is such a weight off my mind.
 
My husband is oblivious to dirt and clutter. After decades of getting angry about it, I finally just hired a maid to clean the house once a week. I keep up with the cleaning the rest of the time and do all the laundry and cooking. He loads the dishwasher and cleans up after dinner at night. The housework is and always has been unequal but he takes care of our enormous yard and clips pastures with the tractor and bushhog, which balances it out. I'd rather scrub toilets than cut grass. I'm retired from work whereas he is still working full time at a high pressure job and occasionally gets paged back to the hospital where he works in the middle of the night to deal with patients. His workload is hard on him because he is 64 years old so I try to make home as stress free as possible for him, a safe harbor from work. It's not perfect but I've finally realized there are some things you just can't change.
 
There's just no middle ground for me coexisting in close proximity with others when it comes to being neat and tidy in my immediate environment. That if you don't keep it that way, I WILL.

Yes, making my live-in relationships complicated at times. :eek:
 
I lived with my sibling at university. So whilst I’m not married like you and that my sib doesn’t have any other factors outside laziness if that counts as a factor.... I do understand the frustration. I’d come home from classes to find nothing done, or general additional mess added to it. In the end we developed a schedule, pinned up on the fridge to share out the chores and responsibilities. We also scheduled the laundry days. It was nice to have some organization and a schedule helped to enforce action.

It was great.
 
Urgh this is why I live alone. I had a housemate who never cleaned up after themselves, after a while I just started taking whatever she'd left lying around (normally things like dirty plates) and piling them up on her bed, she learnt after a while to keep her mess out of my way.
 
I lived with hoarders/control freaks. The house was such a hoard that there were trails between piles that had been sitting for years, accumulating dust and webs. Wasn't my stuff so I didn't feel it was my place to mess with it though. Food and gobs of hair everywhere. But if me or my kid had something small out of place or not cleaned completely, we got yelled at for it. I couldn't even move most of my stuff into the house, it sat and got ruined out in the garage for years. I have allergies and I eventually shut down and resorted to the mechanical room of the basement, the only place they didn't want any part of, and eventually we split up and she moved out. The amount of deep cleaning I had to do was unreal, like a 40 lb bag of dirt and hair BEFORE calling in the steam cleaners. I agree, some people just don't change. Me included.
 
I've been watching Consumed on Netflix. Not a great show, but interesting still and it certainly puts things in perspective..
 
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