Does one person do everything? Do you divide up the chores according to who hates to do what? Do you take turns at everything? Or do you follow the traditional "boys do lawns and cars, girls clean things" program?

Then again, maybe you follow one of the other traditional programs: "neither of us does anything so we live like pigs and the car never runs," or "uh, we have plenty of money; we pay someone to do that."

-- Anonymous, March 20, 2000

Answers

We live in apartment, there is no outside work for us. I usually take care of tending to the car and understanding what is reported about the mechanical care. I usually do the dishes, but there is no big thing. Heather cooks because: One - she is better at it, Two - after cooking for a family of five for a group of years is extremely fast, faster than I beyond measure. Most of the rest of it we split amicably and sometimes work together. We try to be laid back and not overly lazy.

-- Anonymous, March 20, 2000

I probably shouldn't be answering this right now because I am having major roommate problems. He's coming home drunk at 2:30 with his buddies and continuing to drink and shout and play loud music and throw things against the wall and break whatever things aren't broken in the living room. I'm out of here in less than two weeks.

Anyway, some roommates I have had have been great, some have been awful. Some ate all my food and never cleaned up after themselves. I've always wanted to live in a more cooperative-style house with lots of people where you have weekly "house meetings" and an actual schedule for chores, so things get done instead of this "well, if it bothers you then *you* clean it up" attitude.

-- Anonymous, March 20, 2000

For a long time, we had a chore list on the refrigerator. I cleaned the litter box, he cleaned the rabbit cage. I cooked, he washed dishes. I shopped for groceries, he did the accounting. It worked fairly well, especially since I had some leverage, being able to withhold dinner until the dishes were clean.

Since I just quit my job, I imagine things will soon change. I'll take over most of the household and outdoor chores in exchange for him working outside the house to support my gourmet food habit.

I think that's only fair.

-- Anonymous, March 20, 2000

We divide up most of them according to who hates to do what and who cares more. I do the laundry and shopping and make the bed, he does the vacuuming and takes out the trash and recycling and mows the lawn. I don't hate doing laundry and actually like to do shopping, and he likes to mow the lawn. He doesn't care if the bed gets made every day, or how, and I'm a princess who can't sleep on a sheet that isn't smoothed out.

I'm not a great laundress: I won't separate things by color and I won't fold things. I bring the stuff home washed, then sort it. If he wants his underwear folded (he does) he does it. He doesn't complain because it's still better than doing it himself.

We don't do any work on our cars ourselves. He usually takes mine to get maintained because the place is across the street from his work. Neither of us wash our cars.

We don't eat together every night and we go out to eat a lot. If we do eat together, he usually cooks. About once a month I cook something. He doesn't hate it and is better at it.

Beyond that, I guess I'd be willing to live like a pig, but he isn't. He asks me to mop the floor or whatever. We both have problems with clutter and putting things away.

-- Anonymous, March 20, 2000

We originally followed the "Boy takes care of the yard, girl takes care of the house" until I noticed that it was more like "Girl takes care of the house, boy calls someone to take care of the yard" and threw a fit. Now it's "lawn service takes care of the yard and cleaning chick takes care of the house", but I still do the fun stuff like laundry, groceries, and re-cleaning the kitchen after our daughter is done doing the dishes and "cleaning" the counters off each night. (You can only shriek "DO YOU CONSIDER THESE COUNTERS CLEEEEEAN?" so many times before you give it up and wipe them down yourself.)

He cleans the pool, though.

-- Anonymous, March 20, 2000

Stuart and I both love gardening and landscaping so in that department we both do it. In the house the two main chores are divided : Kitchen=Stuart and Laundry=Renee. Everything else is a do as a person feels like it. Although he has cleaned the toilets about ..3 time since we've lived here so he would average about once a year in that. Thankfully, I'm here to fill in the gaps.

I have never mowed the lawn though. We have a riding mower so i guess it wouldn't be that bad. Though I am prone to run over stupid thi

-- Anonymous, March 20, 2000

Mostly I live alone so I do what I want (and what bothers me). I do the groceries, cooking, baking, laundry, general barn chores, horse chores, dog chores, indoor plants, flower gardens, container gardens, bird feeders, sweep daily (dog hair!), make the bed, keep the house organised and neat! When he is here he cooks (cause he is better at it then I am ) and I clean up. I pay someone to clean the house weekly and to do yardwork weekly in the summer/plow the driveway in the winter.

-- Anonymous, March 20, 2000

When we moved into a two-bathroom apartment (which I thought was going to have another closet instead of the second bath), I put my foot down. He cleans his, I clean mine. He cleans the insides of his fixtures regularly; I scrub my entire room, tile and floor and toilet pedestral, less regularly. Different standards.

He cooks, I clean up. (I don't cook.)

On the whole, I don't mind that the house--vacuuming, dusting (ha!), laundry, tidying up in general--is my responsibility. When we first moved in together, he had an outside job that brought the money in and went to school part-time, and I went to school part-time and worked part-time. Any household needs money and labor to keep it going: he provided the money and the cook-labor, and I provided the minimum of other labor.

The only household chore that I think we should take turns on but don't is cleaning the bird's cage. Somehow it's part of the housekeeping instead of part of child-care, which we otherwise split in fixing Blake's meals, baby-sitting, and taking him to the vet. I believe that a child should have some household responsibilities, but thus far Blake refuses to learn to change his bedding, sand his perches, and otherwise disinfect his prison. So I do it.

-- Anonymous, March 20, 2000

I follow the "what will Sabs be most likely to remember to do, with the least amount of nagging" rule.

IT goes something like this:

Sabs has garbage duty Sabs has laundry duty

All other duties are Beth's unless heavy nagging, begging, whining and pleading ensure.

Beth has laundry duty too If Beth doesn't do the laundry and fold it and put it away, it will sit on the floor and the bed and the living room couch until it's mixed in with dirty clothes and cat hair for about three weeks, at which point Beth throws her hands up in despair and does all of the laundry again and folds and puts it away, or hooks sabs with a noose and makes him help her.

Beth has dish duty and kitchen cleaning duty, since Sabs' idea of dishes and kitchen cleaning is to load the dishwasher and swipe a paper towel along the outside edge of the sink.

We had a grease fire on the stove this weekend when I went to make coffee for Sabs' mom because he cooked chicken in too much oil and apparently didn't put the lid on the pan and splattered nearly invisible grease drops on all of the burners.

There was a thin layer of oil, in other words all over the stove and I didn't see it. Hence the small conflagration that had me bouncing around the kitchen looking for something with which to cut off the oxygen flow to the flames, since you can't put out a grease fire with water.

Of course, Sabs, who was on the phone at the time, turned up in response to my wild yelps and calmly was able to find the right tool for the job (the aforementioned lid for the pan) in two seconds.

If I hadn't been so glad to see the fire gone, I'd have smacked him for looking so smug.

Bathroom duty -- if nagged enough, Sabs will capitulate. But yellow rubber gloves must be provided for all chores involving contact between skin and water.

He's more of a "girl" than I am. I just wade right and get up to my elbows in bathtub, toilet or dishwater without a second thought.

Sabs, like his parents is of the frame of mind that if you can get someone else (me in this case) to do it for you, that's great.

I come from a family of do-it-yourselfers.

I never realized what problems these two diametrically opposite philosophies on life could generate as threats to domestic bliss.

-- Anonymous, March 20, 2000

I'm in charge of the kitchen and bathrooms, shopping, cooking & dishes, and mowing the lawn; the kids take care of their own rooms; my wife takes care of the dining room, living room, foyer, and bedroom, laundry, paperwork and bills, and nobody cleans the computer room.

-- Anonymous, March 20, 2000

Oh and I forgot the bills.

Sabs' handwriting is chicken scratch and he tends to pay bills "as they come in" rather than budgeting and planning.

We tried doing them together, but that only led to knock-down drag-out fights.

So that's another Beth duty.

On the cooking front, Sabs is a very good cook, but every meal he cooks is a production. He can't just whip something together quickly and have it on the table in less than 30 minutes.

Since I'm an ace at quick, but nutritious and delicious-tasting meals, guess who does most of the cooking?

This is why we wind up going out more than we ought to -- I can only cook so many nights a week without falling flat on my face from fatigue.

-- Anonymous, March 20, 2000

Let's see, I do the shopping, the cooking and all kitchen related things. It's a strugle to teach Dave that empty soda cans don't go on the counter and dishes go IN the dishwasher.

We tried taking turns with the laundry cause we both hate it, but it seems that I take my turn and Dave takes over three weeks and never finishes his turn, during which time I cannot find a pair of underwear. Lately I'm doing my own and the sheets and towels and I don't know what he's doing.

He does all the lawn mowing and weed wacking. I'm going to be doing the gardening if I find some time this spring.

He does all the fixing and building. He changes bulbs, fixes broken things, and builds furniture. He's going to be redoing our dining room floor and building us a deck this spring.

He will clean bathrooms if I remind him enough. We generally do the cleaning together but I end up doing more. He takes much longer to do a task than me, but he does a very thorough job.

We share the job of taking care of the dogs.

Generally, I do more and I keep track of what needs doing. He doesn't take the initiative and clean anything, only does it when I tell him to or people are coming over.

-- Anonymous, March 20, 2000

When I lived with Wil, I did everything. It wasn't such a big deal because neither of us really cooked, and I have low standards for the cleanliness of objects or areas which are not generally seen close-up by visitors (the kitchen floor, inside of the oven, wads of cat fur under the bed, etc.) We also had an inhumanly large washer/dryer set that could hold about ninety cubic feet of clothes, so three weeks of laundry could be done in a couple of hours. I'm not a nag and I hate confrontation much, much more than I hate vacuuming, dishes, litterboxes, and mildew.

Of course in retrospect it's pretty clear that subconscious seeds of resentment may have blossomed into something really noxious after nine years of that.

One thing Wil always did was the bills, because I had to work with QuickBooks all day at work and the idea of coming home to Quicken was more than I could stomach, and when he would try to fob bill duty off on me I would just not pay anything until the gas company hung a shutoff notice on the front door. He set up auto-billpayer on everything he could, though.

And neither of us ever did anything with the yard. Not. A. Damn. Thing. I am so glad you never saw that yard, Beth. Any and all respect you ever had for me would have landed with a splat on your compost heap. I considered it kind of a theft protection system for the house. As long as we ignored the yard it gave the whole place the tinge of poverty it needed to ward off those in search of easily fencible goods.

.................................................

-- Anonymous, March 20, 2000