To ask how to approach this?

[zorraaa]

I live in a house share and as part of our cleaning rota, we have to do one clean each a month. One person is great at it, two less good. We have had chats, they have promised but roll forward a few weeks and neither of them have done it! What should I say? They are my friends but I am reluctant to do three weeks worth of cleaning when I should only be doing one...

everyone chips in for a weekly cleaner?

Yep that is an option but neither of them want to do it. They are happy enough for the other two of us to do our clean but forget to do theirs! How to communicate this without sounding accusatory?

Why don't they want to have a weekly cleaner?

Insist on a cleaner or go on strike!

You said each of you agreed to do a big clean once a month, so if you get a cleaner once a month that should not break the bank if shared amongst you. Stand your ground.

Do not become the skivvy here do you hear me!

Just say "hi folks, the place needs a good clean once a month at least. That's what we agreed, on rotation. Myself (and X, not sure how many of you) are doing it all the time, you are not. How about getting someone in once a month, then we can ALL be lazy fuckers like you two.. "

Woops.

Say, "you either do the weekly clean yourself, on time, or you pay for a cleaner to do it for you."

Oh I get it now. There must be four of you, so each of you do a weekly clean.

Get a weekly cleaner, scrub my above post about once a month. But leave the rest of it stand!

Tell them that if they don't clean it you will call for a cleaver and charge them for it. Have them sign a simple contact to that effect.

A cleaver might not work so well, would create much more mess in the long run, with the blood and all.

If they r friends surely u just sat it "guys we agreed on cleaning and its not been followed."

Toad,

LOL.

Is the cleaning for hoovering communal areas? Because otherwise I don’t see why your flat mates aren’t tidying up after themselves that you’re left with 3weeks worth of cleaning.

DS2 had this problem with some roommates. They way they solved it was by having a 'scrub up Saturday'. They divided the rooms (kitchen, bathroom, living room) and every other Saturday morning each drew a room out of a hat. You cleaned whichever you drew and the cleaning took place right then and no one left until they were finished with their room. It worked pretty well.

I love AcrossthePond55's idea. I would do that.

If not, I'd say 'The cleaning is not getting done so we will try rota for one more week and then if not, we will start interviews for cleaner."

How many bathrooms do you share? If it's two, the 2 slobs should share a bath.

I'm willing to bet that they don't think cleaning needs to be done that often, and that the bi-weekly cleans that the other two of you do are more than enough.

Maybe explain to them that when they don't do their part, that puts more work onto the rest of you, leaves an unfairly larger workload for the two of you who do clean?

Perhaps they'll understand it in those terms?

Change the wi-if password until they've done their share of the cleaning.

Say - "this system of a once weekly clean is not working. How shall we solve it?"

Wait for them to propose a solution.

Agree to trial this for a defined limited time period: 4 weeks/8 weeks/12 weeks etc.

Agree that if anyone slips off rota again a cleaner will be employed, cost split 4 ways.

How to communicate this without sounding accusatory?

there are quite a few apps etc you can download to share chores, which takes the accusatory emotion out of it - each person ticks it off on app, app tells the story of who is doing their bit or not.

But to be honest, if they are the lazy ones you do need to accuse them of it or why should they change?

Playing Devil's Advocate, surely it depends on standards? Are yours higher than theirs?

I ask because I used to share. My flat mate basically followed me round tutting and basically recleaning. It got demoralising. Then infuriating.

I was (at the time) a cleaner!

I lived with people like this. We changed it to different rooms each week so you didn’t have to clean the house house, just a room.

I get all of your points - yes definitely a case of different standards as we have had this convo time and again. They don’t suggest anything different though - thereby giving us two the “mental load” of sorting things out/asking them what they want/coming up with a rota. Obviously I don’t want to enforce my standards on others (and I don’t!) but it winds me up how they are happy for me to do it but not happy to do it themselves. Unfair! Happy to get a cleaner but noone apart from me wants to pay 😂

Might just say, ok this weekly clean thing isn’t working - what shall we do.

Do you have the rule of leaving the room as you found it?

I found that to be really effective when sharing digs in my youth.

Yep but therein lies the problem!!

Apparently it’s not always feasible to do that...