MoreDangerousThanAWomanScorned ·
03/02/2025 10:19
Yes, this is basically a whinge about my husband, but I want MN validation that I am right. I am prepared I may instead get told that he is, in which case I shall simply never tell him I asked...!
DH and I both work four days a week in fairly full-on jobs, have two young kids, we volunteer, both have hobbies, the older kid has hobbies. Basically we are busy people. One of the consequences of this is that our house is quite far from a show home. I would say we split the domestic stuff pretty evenly but that we have quite different attitudes to what 'doing the cleaning' is, and it's driving me potty. I feel that, at this stage in our lives, if we get the hoovering done, all the surfaces clean, the clutter manageable and the sheets and towels are changed with a reasonable regularity, we're doing well. He thinks that 'a job isn't worth doing unless it's worth doing properly'. But in practice this means we spend the same time cleaning, but I can do basically the whole house in that time and he works industriously on making a tiny area perfect.
For instance, yesterday. His parents were coming over for lunch, so in the morning we agreed we needed to clean. I went upstairs and changed all the beds, tidied all the rooms (making the kids 'help' me with theirs, which was actually considerably slower than doing it solo), cleaned the upstairs bathroom and vaccumed the stairs and upstairs. I came downstairs to find a kitchen sink that literally gleamed, two kitchen cupboards fully reorganised and cleaned, the microwave fully cleaned inside and out, and DH bent over the oven carefully getting crumbs out of the dipped line around the hob. He hadn't been secretly slacking off - he clearly had been cleaning the whole time. But he had also, to my mind, achieved naff all in the greater goal of making the house look as if civilized humans live there.
He says if we did it my way all the time the 'fiddly jobs' would never get done - that cupboard would stay a disorganized mess for ever more. I think that in our current stage of life that is normal, and basically we can just live with the cupboards being a mess for the sake of having the whole house look ok. AIBU?
YABU = he is right, the 'deep jobs' need doing and if that means you live in a house where every other room is chaos but the understairs cupboard looks fab so be it
YANBU = you are right, there is limited time and so it is fine to do everything to an ok standard rather than anything being done to perfection