How do you keep your home? - Page 2

[berkeleyp]

I am enjoying reading this thread so much and at the same time thinking - dd is asleep - i really shoud be vaccuuming or something. Oh well.

Today I got to the *real* root of it all. He thinks that what I do isn't as hard because I get joy out of it. I get to see DS smile at me when I'm changing a diaper.. And I get to snuggle with him until he falls asleep.

Right there with ya. Dh works a ton - mostly manual labor - he is just getting a home improvement/new home construction business up and running and i hardly see him it seems.

I take dd to work with me 25 hours a week and do all the cleaning and most of the cooking (dh usually cooks once a week). He gives me a hard time (not too bad) that the house is not immaculate and acts like I have this wonderful carefree life just because I get to go for a walk with friends most days, with dd of course. He just doesn't understand that 24/7 working even if it is what you might call light duty takes its toll. I need that walk every day.
Really he is not too bad: he doesn't say things very often but it bothers me when he does. The worst he ever said was somthing to the effect of "why is it that my grandmother's could work full time, keep their houses immaculate, take care of kids, and have a delicious home cooked meal on the table every night and you can't handle one kid working part time." He has his moments when i just could kill him. Sorry for the somewhat off topic rant.

So greenie - since we live in the same house how is your system working for ya so far?

I have realized that a big part of my problem is that many of the things i own don't have a place where they belong. We haven't really finished moving in (we moved last Sept) and are short on shelving and other organizers. My dream is to have someone (perhaps a crew of people ) come and organize my house with all those neat bins and shelves they have at IKEA or something. I think if I could start out super orgnanized I might have a shot at staying organized. Since I suppose that won't happen though - i'm just gonna have to continue in my current path of semi-mess, semi-motivated, semi-clean house.

[WNB]

I've been away from my parents' and out of school for about 15 years, and it's evolved a lot in that time. For a long time it was characterized by "cramming" in cleaning frenzies when I wanted to have company over or (horrors) my husband's family was coming to visit. This was entirely self-induced - not something my dh considered something I should be responsible for -- I just didn't want my in-laws to think I was a horrible housekeeper. My DH honestly could care less about how clean the house is, or isn't.

After move to second house that was just far too big for our needs, I decided to stop with all the masochism and let the house be if and when the family came over for a visit. DH does his laundry when he runs out. I do my laundry (and his) when I run out, and I'm generally the sheet changer, and, until recently, the bathroom cleaner. Kitchen is tidied up by both of us.

My latest decision re: housekeeping was to make a list of the chores I hated AND chores that I felt needed to be done more often than I could bring myself to do them (and more often than DH would do them). I hate nagging -- especially about doing stuff that I myself hate -- so I just looked on Craigslist for an affordable housekeeping service, called up and made arrangements to get the hateful stuff taken care of. It's not a huge list, so it's not a lot of money, and it eliminates that festering resentment I had each time I would finally do the hated chores (after waiting and waiting and waiting for the grubbiness to trip DH's tolerance -- but I always cracked first).

The house is cleaner, there's less unvoiced friction between DH and me, and what's left to do is the stuff that DH and I don't really mind doing on an ongoing basis. We're not neat freaks by any stroke of the imagination, but I"m really hoping to avoid the exhausting (and allergy-attack-inducing) cleaning frenzies I used to put myself through. We'll see -- so far, so good though.