Can't be arsed doing housework

[HettyMeg]

I am just back at work four days a week after mat leave, husband works full time.

I do not want to spend our weekends cleaning. I want us to spend time together as a family. We are both burnt out every eve from working and having young child.

The bare minimum gets done - bathrooms wiped down every couple of weeks. Hoover downstairs once a week, upstairs once every several weeks (!). Wipe down kitchen surfaces a few times a day, as I'm still a germaphobe despite my slovenliness. Washing is mostly dealt with.

However we have dispensed of dusting, ironing and the floors are not mopped regularly.

Am I being unreasonable?

you could always get your child involved in the cleaning

I do 🙋🏼‍♀️ we store our clothes in drawers/cube units and despite the most careful folding they always get creased in there. So we iron but we only do it when we need to wear the item, sod having and 'ironing pile' like my mum does! That's absolute madness to me

Yes we take our shoes off at the door as well. But still wash the floors twice a week, not including immediate spot cleaning if a spill.

Doesn't bother my conscience one bit. I have a cleaner so my floors do get mopped once every two weeks, we don't wear shoes inside and we don't have pets (though do occasionally get visiting dogs) . But before my cleaner and when my kitchen came straight in from inside I still didn't mop regularly and guess what... all 3 of my kids are absolutely fine.

In fact they are a damn sight healthier than my friends kids and she mops every other day.

Can you explain to me exactly what you think might happen to a child that plays on a floor that isn't mopped regularly?

Got rid of fitted carpets and replaced with laminate wood floors. Never iron anything

Yanbu. This is why we have a cleaner.

I don’t iron anything either. DH does his own work shirts. Nothing else gets ironed.

Things like the bathroom are easy. When you use the loo, have a wipe round one thing. My bathroom has annoying dust gathering parts to it, so I will wipe a ledge, spray and wipe the basin or loo, or empty the bin, every time I go in. I'm talking about one minute at a time. Even better if two of you make it a habit! The same in the kitchen. I only wash the floor every couple of weeks, but keep a mop in there and spray any dirty marks, and wipe with the mop.
I do more or less the same in the kitchen. If I'm waiting for the kettle to boil, or have a break when cooking, I'll wipe down a cupboard front or wash any dishes. I have a Eufy and put that on upstairs a couple of times a week. If the floor is hoovered it makes the room look a lot cleaner. You really can do a lot of housework without doing a lot of housework, if you see what I mean!
I never dust all our living room at one time either. I start by the door and do one or two things every day. Again, a couple of minutes at a time.
My friend gave me a good tip . She keeps a can of spray polish and a duster in a drawer in every room. Much easier to just get that out for a quick dust round than having to go and find the stuff you need.

Echo what others have said - wipe down surfaces and clean things like the bathroom and kitchen as you use them, that way they're effectively always clean.

Washing - I hang mine up by person so that I can fold it by person as it's dry, that way no time wasted sorting washing - each pile just goes in that persons room to be put away.

Put things away as you use them, try to keep the house as clutter free as you can as that saves HEAPS of time if you don't need to tidy before you dust and hoover!!

Dusting and hoovering I don't tackle "all in one go". I might do the living room one day if I've cut DHs hair for him. Another day I might do the bedroom if say I've stripped the bed.

I work 4 days - my day off is spent doing my hobby not bloody cleaning the house!!!

I think that you keep the house to your own preferred standards but agree with a PP that not doing any "real" cleaning allows things to build up badly. We have a robot vacuum and one way I know it works really really well is that DD's bed is the one bed in the house that it can't go under - I had to pull it out the other day and I was SHOCKED. Our main vacuum extender pipe is broken but as soon as I sort that I CLEARLY need to get in there.

There are ways to make cleaning a bit easier though even without a cleaner. Robot vacuum is my biggest tip. If you have ironing you absolutely want done, find a local service. Spray and wipe down kitchen surfaces as part of the post-dinner clear up and similarly, spray and clean bathroom surfaces while DC are in the bath.

I think a really good vacuum, including of skirting boards and in high up corners is a great way to keep the overall dirt down. Otherwise it just returns instantly. Dusting can, at a push, be done just every 2 weeks (I hate dusting but also hate dusty surfaces, so have experimented with this ratio quite a lot).

Make DH do it!

He may work full time but you working 4 days plus having a baby is more work than 5 days FT for DH.

Children are more likely to get sick if crawling and playing on a dirty floor. The fact your children are not getting sick isn’t because of exposure to dirt and germs, it is in spite of exposure to bad home sanitation. You’re rather like the chain smoker who dies at age 89 of natural causes who insists smoking is healthy and doesn’t cause cancer- the rare exception to the rule.

Ah yes, exactly like the chain smoker. 😂

Exposure to germs is EXACTLY what improves an immune system. (Though I agree my anecdotal example was not scientific).

And here is some actual science for you...

www.webmd.com/parenting/features/kids-and-dirt-germs

And for the record, not mopping your floors daily/weekly does not a dirty floor/bad sanitation home make. It does also depend on how you use your home.

That's literally all the cleaning I ever do! YANBU

The fact your children are not getting sick isn’t because of exposure to dirt and germs

Actually, it could well be exactly what it’s because of.

I think a lot of people go OTT with cleaning and tidying, to be honest. I'm pretty much the same, and I'll deal with things as and when they become a visible problem. Then me and DP will spend a couple of hours blitzing, then get on with our lives. No probelm.

I find if the house is deep cleaned immaculate and tidy it's much easier to keep on top of it by just doing little and often and having a little routine, stops it becoming overwhelming.

It's the deweeding that drives me loopy I have a double drive surrounded by gravel and no matter what I do those bastards come straight through the gravel. Takes me a good 3 or 4 hours a week just on that and it's miserable in the colder months but no money to have it tarmaced.

I have to iron some things because they're really creased after washing and drying. That's true whether I tumble or line dry. Like some shirts, skirts and trousers. Depends on material I suppose.

I don't get how so many people seem to own not one single item that doesn't hang dry without creases!

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 the so called “hygiene hypothesis” was debunked ages ago. It’s not real science. At all. It’s a bit like the “science” of tobacco companies that found smoking improved lung function, reduced asthma attacks, and is definitely not linked to cancer.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1700688114
”That “hygiene hypothesis,” first proposed in 1989 (3), has become enshrined in popular culture: We’re too clean for our own good. It’s a straightforward, compelling idea. And many scientists are eager to see it thrown out.
“We know an awful lot now about why our immune system’s regulation is not in terribly good shape, and it’s got absolutely nothing to do with hygiene,” says Graham Rook, an emeritus professor of medical microbiology at University College London. Today, epidemiological, experimental, and molecular evidence support a different hypothesis: Early exposure to a diverse range of “friendly” microbes—not infectious pathogens—is necessary to train the human immune system to react appropriately to stimuli. If this new hypothesis is true, then cutting back on personal hygiene will not have an impact on rates of chronic inflammatory and allergic disorders; it will, however, increase infections. The hygiene hypothesis is a “dangerous misnomer which is misleading people away from finding the true causes of these rises in allergic disease,” says Sally Bloomfield, chair of the International Scientific Forum on Home Hygiene and an honorary professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “I’ve even seen things in the media saying we shouldn’t wash our hands. What the hell are they talking about?””

The hygiene hypothesis is out of date and is undermining public health
medicalxpress.com/news/2019-03-hygiene-hypothesis-date-undermining-health.html
Researchers are concerned that attitudes to hygiene are being undermined by the hygiene hypothesis, and that this misleading misnomer could contribute to the spread of infectious disease.

Scientists debunk idea that rise in allergic diseases is due to homes becoming “too clean”
www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e6673
”UK researchers say that they have dismantled the “myth” that allergic diseases have risen to epidemic levels because people now live in sterile homes and have become “too clean.” A report published today by the International Scientific Forum on Home Hygiene rejects the so called hygiene hypothesis, which first suggested more than 20 years ago that reduced exposure to infection in early childhood as a result of improved cleanliness might explain the rise of some allergies.1 Not only is the theory unsupported by evidence, says the report, it is “confusing and potentially dangerous” because it could put people off washing and cleaning to remove possible pathogens when the threat of infectious disease is rising.”

No, Your Clean Home Isn't Messing With Your Immune System. Here's Why
www.sciencealert.com/no-your-home-being-too-clean-isn-t-causing-our-immune-systems-to-be-weaker-here-s-why
“Sometimes unhelpful (or just plain wrong) health advice sticks in our brains. For example, you don't necessarily need to drink eight glasses of water every day, and an apple a day may not keep the doctor away if you have fructose intolerance. But what about overly sanitized homes ruining our immune systems? Although it's been debunked time and time again, this incorrect interpretation of the 'hygiene hypothesis' has stuck around in our collective consciousness. Now, researchers in the UK have published a paper systematically rejecting the idea that we're just too clean for our own good.“

Nope. It’s a myth like an apple a day keeps the doctor away.

Mumset will have you thinking that everyone is dedicating at least an hour or two to cleaning per day, which is nonsense. The vast majority of people get along with about the same amount of cleaning that you describe, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. I would say most of my friends' houses are a bit grubbier than I would let mine get, but as long as it doesn't smell bad, as long as the toilet is clean and there's a fresh towel and hand soap, that is really all that matters. My friends are lovely people with happy, healthy families and a few fingerprints on the lightswitch doesn't change that.

If you can afford it, get a cleaner. If not, look into some ways to streamline your cleaning so you can get more done with the same or less effort-

I have a rechargeable stick hoover for the hard floors downstairs and one of those spinning vileda mop wringer buckets that make it much easier to do a quick sweep and mop - the spinning wringer means you're not slopping so much water on the floor and it gets done and dried faster so it doesn't seem like such a palaver. I run the stick vac every day and mop once a week or so.

Get "magic erasers" (cheap melamine cleaning sponges from homebase or amazon) to do around the bath and the shower screen, they get up soap scum and rings with about a tenth of the effort of a regular cloth or sponge.

Get one of those long sticks with the disposable fluffy duster sheets to whip around the room top to bottom before you hoover- start overhead with the cobwebs and the top of the doorframes, then whip it over the tops of things on shelves and the TV stand or whatever, then along the top of the baseboards and behind the radiators. Literally takes less than three minutes and you knock all the dust onto the floor before you hoover it up.

If you get that gross mix of grease and dust that is impossible to clean off the top of the extractor fan hood/refrigerator/cabinets, sugar soap in a spray bottle gets it right up.

@SomethingVexesThee partly by careful organisation of drying.

Don't let washing sit in the machine when it's finished, get it straight out. Ditto the dryer.

Give it a good shake as it comes out of the washer, and smooth problem areas like collars as you hang it.

Some items do better on a lower spin. I've got one dress I need to be careful with.
Anything that doesn't respond after careful handling gets rehomed!

Aha, I suspect the rehoming bit is key to your success! Also suspect you're less lazy and slapdash than I am when hanging things out

Yep, I've got to really love a dress that's high maintenance!

And I'm super careful about hanging. Takes a few seconds extra per item, but saves ages.

I have little clips that attach to the line so I can hang clothes on their hangers.

Carefully onto the hanger on the line, then straight into the wardrobe (on the same hanger) when it's dry. Saves so much time.