To think that it's fine to just do the cleaning basics?

[MoreDangerousThanAWomanScorned]

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

You two only work 4 days a week.

If the cleaning is too much, why on earth are you both volunteering?

I've volunteered for over 15 years but only because I have the time and my DC are grown!

I am going to slightly disagree with othe rposters. I do agree that the deep cleaning does need to be done at times and so agreeing some sort of compromise on that is best.

BUT... it seems to me that he's also just really really slow and using this deep cleaning as an excuse. With all due respect, I could clean the kitchen to a very high standard (minus sorting out the cupboards, admittedly), and one small bathroom/toilet, as well as do a basic wipe down of the oven and still have time to run the vacuum round the downstairs and do some light dusting while someone else was doing bedding/towels, main bathrooms and kids' tidy up.

We had a similar issue for quite a while - DH would, for example, vacuum.... but he'd move every single piece of furniture and the vacuuming would be spotless. BUT, the whole thing would take him 4 hours AND he'd still land up missing things like vacuuming around window frames etc. Meanwhile, I'd have done every other bit of cleaning in the house from bathrooms, to bedding, to dusting, kitchen AND probably entertaine the DC too. I think it might have been the closest we have ever come to divorce. Sadly, we haven't solved the prolen by him changing but rather by having a cleaner who comes fortnightly and then the things that he takes forever to do (while sighing about how hard he is working and how he has to do so much) are things I just ignore him doing. Eg the PRODUCTION he makes of sorting laundry.... it's never ending but as that is his official task, I just let him get on with it and if he want sto feel all hard done by, that's fine. The reality is that when I do it, it takes half the time and gets done to pretty much the same standard.

If you're arguing that he was doing jobs nobody sees then why clean upstairs and change sheets which surely your guests don't see either?
I don't think either of you are right or wrong to be honest. The day to day and the fiddly jobs both need doing and it's hard to say without knowing the true state of your house.

Let him do the deep clean and just work around him to get everything more or less straight for the visitors. My attitude would be shut the bedroom doors! And get the downstairs and the bathroom acceptable first, then potter around upstairs if there is time.

Not unreasonable, but I think you can both win here. You do a general sweep around of the whole house, he takes one room at a time and smashes it.

Tbh if you were only cleaning because your IL were visiting I'd only have done the downstairs and the bathroom (unless they were staying over)

How often does he do the fiddly jobs, surely the cupboards only need reorganised every 6 months, the oven doesn't need cleaning each week.

Can you both sit down and pull a list together of how often each thing gets done and who does it? Weekly, monthly, 6 monthly etc and he can work from that. I'd not mind someone doing those fiddly jobs and I gave the house a once over

Yes, I do think there is some of this here. He is working continuously - he's not sneakily sat down on his phone or anything - but I definitely think he is not going at top pace! And I think it's all part of the same 'must do it completely and as a distinct task' mindset - he doesn't do 'a bit here and there' as I do, which he would say is higher standards but I think is inefficient. I wouldn't clean the microwave when I was just trying to get the kitchen in order, but I might do it one day while waiting for the kettle to boil when I had a minute. He would absolutely never do that. I always do something while waiting for the kettle whereas he just... waits?

Our house is 'passable' as far as cleanliness is concerned. There are always toys/legos lying around, drying clothes and half-cleaned kitchen. We would never have time to ourselves if we cleaned everything all the time.

I don't think either of you are wrong as such, but it's about expectations when visitors are coming. The oven doesn't need to be perfect, but the bathroom, ideally, does. It's almost like he's focusing on the wrong areas and leaving the rest for you which isn't very fair.

Like others have said, could be worth deciding who does what and when, and having a list of things that definitely need doing before visitors come.

You are both right. The big stuff needs to happen - occasionally but regularly.

DH and I had to have a proper talk about this very recently as the house was making me depressed. Two weekends and a solid plan and the house has basically stayed tidy.

You need to do all the basics on a kind of schedule and then it it stays tidy leaving time for the bigger jobs.

Before visitors is not the time for deep cleaning the kitchen and oven.

My aim has been to have the house in a reasonable state at all times and therefore if visitors were coming it would take 30 mins to be ready.

Yup, I think you have the same DH as me.

MIne, for example, will absolutely load the dishwasher. But for reasons I simply cannot understand, he will collect glasses/plates from around the house and bring them to the kitchen .... where he will leave them next to the sink. Then, if I do not load them, he will come along and load them later, sure, but it's a completely separate and distinct task.

To be fair, I'd probably clean the microwave as part of a kitchen clean myself - but if I was doing a clean of the kitchen ahead of people coming over I wouldn't be doing a deep clean but a relatively surface clean so no microwave, no removing toaster to get to crumbs, no moving bread tin out the way to clean behind/under it etc.

I don't actually have an answer. It drives me mad. And DH is like this with loads of other things too. Another one that we have argued about is, for example, is for his work he goes to a specific place to deliver a service for which he takes equipment. So I accept that there's a bit of effort to load/unload and pack himself up (but to be clear - think hairdresser, not carpenter!). But I can get back from the office in central London in less time than it takes him to get home from a client 3 miles away in the car. He literally cannot RUSH. We are 90% sure he has ADHD (as does DS) so I try to be understanding but I think it's probably one of the things that causes the most tension in our marriage because like your DH, he's NOT sitting around on his butt but I'm still resentful because I feel like sometimes I have to do it all.

As I said, the way we manage this to a certain point is that I simply refuse to get drawn into this sort of thing. I leave him to it and it he's spending an hour on a task and is pissed as I've sat on the couch as I've finished my task, I literally just ignore him. I KNOW that his task shouldn't take that long so it's not my problem.

I'm a sahm and very rarely deep clean my oven, my cupboards are messy and dusting is well overdue. Who cares? On the surface my house looks clean and tidy and I do the basics.

Life is too short and when relatives comes to visit I doubt they are running their fingers along the skirting boards or checking to see how clean my fridge is.

I think people who deep clean regularly and have a tick list of jobs tend to have OCD type/anxiety behaviours. I know when I was younger and bothered about this kind of stuff it was all tied up in my MH.

Honestly I wouldn't have done either of your approaches! He didn't need to empty the cupboards out, you didn't need to focus on the upstairs rooms when they were coming for lunch.

Overall you should make a good team though, if you generally do the 'make it habitable' stuff, and he does deep cleaning in one specific area at a time, that should work quite well?

I don't think anything has to be perfect, and visitors come to see us, not the house.

Wednesday: reorganise kitchen cupboards

Every week? We reorganise our kitchen cupboards… never

Thank you @Namechange305050 - I've been frantically scrolling for a reply like yours! I think I cleaned a cupboard once..

Regular deep cleaning makes the everyday much easier in my opinion. If you're starting clean, organised and decluttered, a quick tidy and hoover is much easier. But obviously immediately before visitors isn't the time to start.

Unclenching about the whole thing makes it even easier. Trust me.

It’s not really a “one is right, one is wrong”‘situation- your ways of cleaning should really complement each other. You keep everything ticking over and he does the “fiddly jobs” for the same amount of time, so everything gets done.

Where he went wrong was choosing to do the cupboard sorting right when guests were coming and an appearance of clean and tidiness for the whole room was essential. He should have done that another day.

Havent voted because it’s not a one or the other situation- you’re both both U and NU - unreasonable because the two of you haven’t got your heads together to make this work in a complementary way.

i did wonder this.....

I have different priorities.

I'd clean the areas that would be seen by the guests. Sitting room, bathroom, kitchen, hall.

We'd have a room each.

I'm not clenched at all thanks. Don't need to be because clean is far easier to maintain than start from scratch. My house is not spotless, I'm not obsessive, but I don't take pride in being grubby like some seem to.

Maybe I made the volunteering sound a bit more full-on than it is. We both do regular roles at our church, DH is a regular leader at Beavers, I help run a community project - things like that. Personally, I think dropping volunteering - which is meaningful to us and which keeps activities we both want to be there for us and our children going - to do more cleaning would be utterly mad priorities. DH and I may not agree on cleaning methods but we both agree on that. This is why it frustrates me if we're doing two hours of cleaning each - me doing the whole house, him doing one deep clean - when we could only be doing an hour each and I think it would be fine!

We both 'only' work four days a week because that's what we've done since our first child - I don't think it's at all unusual to have a part-time parent for preschoolers, we just split it across us rather than the 'usual' one full-time one part-time. DH is going back full-time in September when DC2 starts school and I'll change to working five short days rather than four long.

Ha ha - that’s like when I ask my teen to do something or she does her own “jobs” around the house - she will literally do the job I’ve asked and not anything more! Ie “clearing the dishwasher” means precisely that - taking stuff out and putting it in the cupboards - she would never dream of also putting the stuff that is by the dishwasher waiting for her to complete that task IN the dishwasher, whereas if I were doing it, it would just be automatic.

It’s the distinction between doing a job to placate another person such as a parent, and actually wanting the house to be clean and tidy, I think. So the aim is different!

I think this is actually the perfect way to do it!

you do all the basics, he does the deep cleans!

I'm a single parent, with low standards, so as long as the basics are done, I'm happy (and my basics are below here - for example, I'm fine with the sides being wiped once a week, and the hoovering once a month because I'm not losing sleep in order to do more). This means that during the school holidays when I don't have school runs so save 3 hours a day, I get things like clearing out a cupboard, or cleaning the fridge, or going through a wardrobe done. - but you have a whole spare human to do that, I say let him!