AIBU to expect DH to replace my ruined jumper(s)

[PILinOz]

I love the feel and look of cashmere and wool jumpers but cannot justify paying full price. Instead I scour TK Maxx and Vinted for bargains.
Over the past few years I have managed to find and buy myself a few lovely pieces at a heavy discount. My lovely mother-in-law also bought me a lovely cashmere jumper last Christmas.

My husband has managed to ruin all of them by just shoving them in with the regular laundry. They’ve all shrunk and felted. Each time his reaction to this has been to go “Oops, my bad, sorry” and kind of shrug his shoulders and that was the end of it.

A couple of weeks ago I found a lovely, BNWT wool/cashmere blend jumper on Vinted for £20. The original price tag was £125. I wore it and put it in the laundry basket. A few days later DH announces he’s going to do some laundry. I warn him that a few of my newly purchased work items are in there and not to touch them please. Later on he comes to tell me that he’s really sorry but he’s only gone and completely ruined my new cashmere jumper. He apologises profusely. I tell him I’m really upset. This is the about the 4th time he’s done this and I specifically told him not to touch my stuff. More apologising. He seems genuinely sorry for once

Later on I find him scrolling the internet to find a replacement. Of course he can’t find the exact same one as it came from Vinted and isn’t current season, but he finds something similar by the same brand and offers to buy it. It costs £165

Here is where I may be unreasonable. We earn roughly the same and pool all our finances into our joint account. I cannot justify using £165 of family money for a jumper. That just seems wild to me. I tell him this and he gets annoyed. I try to explain that spending £165 of our money to rectify his mistake isn’t fair. That I spend my time and effort to find these items and only purchase them at a price we can realistically afford. He thinks that I should just go out and buy new replacement jumpers at full price as we have the money. As far as he is concerned he has offered a solution which I am rejecting so that’s the end of it.

I brought it up again yesterday and said again that I think it’s totally unfair that he’s now ruined 4 of my nice jumpers and has no intention of putting in any effort to replace them. He looked incredulous and said “What, are you really expecting me to go through the rails at TK Maxx or join Vinted to find replacements?” I said I didn’t think it was such an unreasonable request and why should the burden of finding a solution to a problem he caused by his repeated carelessness, fall to me? He told me I was massively overreacting and he’s done talking about it. AIBU? Yes: it’s just a few jumpers, get over it and move on. No: DH should use his time and effort to source suitable replacements that won’t cost the family a fortune.

Maybe I am being unreasonable and maybe I am taking this harder than I should. It just really, really annoys me that he pays little care and attention to things that don’t really matter to him.
Contrast that when it’s something he does care about eg his work- or his guitars. When he needs to change the strings or do any maintenance, he ceremoniously clears the dining table, puts down a blanket and cushions for protection and uses soft cloths to clean it and generally looks like he’s being very careful and methodical in the task.

Our spare room is used for me wfh and for his guitars. Quite often I have to clear away his music stuff before I can get started work. I’m careful to handle things with care and put them away properly, right down to his tiny wee plectrums to make sure they’re not lost. If I accidentally damaged something expensive, I’d be on marketplace, ReVerb and all the buy and sell sites to try and source a replacement.

No, not the woman's fault

It's the responsibility of the person who wants something to have special treatment to NOT put that item in with the ordinary stuff.

I really don’t like the posters on here who gloat about the ‘punishments’ they would like to dole out to men. Someone has just boasted that her husband is terrified of her. Someone has of these posts are abusive whichever way you read them. Very distasteful

@PILinOz Stop being so careful with his music crap. Tell him to make sure he’s tidied his shit away before the start of your work day, and that if he leaves it then if anything gets lost or damaged then oops, his fault for not putting them elsewhere. He’s selfish. He’s fucking rude for leaving your work space covered in his music stuff. Tempted to do a dramatic arm sweep to clear it off your desk? Four times might work.

I used to separate out all of my wool from the regular washing. My partner recently asked me to put it all into one basket, because he prefers to sort through it by hand and separate out wool from regular clothes when he wants to put on a wash. This is the kind of normal attention to detail that someone who gives a damn about others’ possessions would show.

Your partner clearly has to exercise a lot of the same care and attention to detail with his work, and I’d question why he’s unable or unwilling to value household tasks at the same standard. In the end it’s not that the jumper was ruined that’s the problem; it’s that he’s repeatedly shown that he does not place the same value on your belongings as he does his own.

Why on earth don’t you have upper own laundry basket? My DH lives in old tatty clothes unless we’re are going somewhere nice. I live in nice clothes and outfits from Ralph Lauren, coast, Ted baker nobodies child etc . I would be devastated if he washed his chores with mine and ruined them so I have a laundry basket that he knows he is 100% not allowed to touch ( in the same way that I would never try to clean his guitars).

you know he’s terrible and yet you keep supplying him with more clothes to ruin. You should have dealt with this the first time it happened.

But you also paid little care or attention, you chucked it in the laundry basket and even when you knew he was doing a load, he’d shrunk 3 jumpers before, you still didn’t bother going and getting it. You seem to be giving yourself a pass, but not him. You’d think after the last 3 times, you’d pay more care and attention?

Like other posters I don’t do that, I pick it all up and shove it in. Nd I don’t expect anyone else to go rooting through it either, I expect the owner, myself included, to pay enough attention they don’t throw delicates into the general laundry basket. It’s the owners responsibility not the person doing the laundries.

Lots of people on this thread having a hard time with the idea that not everyone has the same laundry system as them.

It’s rhe ones posting if your spouse doesn’t pick through the laundry it means they don’t care for you. Bloody heck.

I wouldn’t be over careful moving stuff that he should have put away, given it’s a communal space and you work from that space. I’d move it in a quick way, trying to ensure nothing was broken but the aim would be to move it as quickly as I could. I would put it on the floor and not back to where it should be. If something got broken, I wouldn’t consider it my fault at all and wouldn’t be looking for replacement bits. In our house, we all use the desk in our office/study - a rule being you leave the desk cleared and ready for the next person when finished.

Well as the weather is warming up I'd take my time to find similar bargains on Vinted. But also also have a basket for your clothes and tell him you'll wash those yourself from now on.

I never put things like this in a laundry basket. I would handwash them. To mitigate any future damage by your DH, I can only suggest that you don’t let the jumpers into his contact. I’d get a one off new one now and enjoy it.

I'd take the money and then scour vinted.

If it happened again, I'd also be a bit careless with stuff that's important to him, but stuff he can't bill you for. So a slightly oversalted meal or "forgetting" his fries from an order.

Why don’t you have your own washing basket? Then he does his laundry and you do your own?

Why do you KEEP putting them with the other laundry?????
YABU as you can’t expect anyone to spend hours looking for cheap cashmere jumpers that you repeatedly put in general laundry.
I would sleep with them under my pillow!! I would also expect family/friends etc to ruin cashmere as some people just don’t understand how delicate it is.

We do our own washing. We have two different baskets. I don’t want him doing my washing and vice versa.

Same.

She literally told him, four whole times.

And if it was a man complaining, he would be told to do his own washing in future.

Ooh the mature approach…🙄

OP cba to separate her expensive clothes or wash them herself by hand so that’s what happens 🤷‍♀️

Why is it not reasonable?

Because the Op left them in the washing basket (it’s easy to forget to separate them) and because if it was a man whinging he would be told to do his own washing 🤷‍♀️

🤣 You're actually so lacking in self awareness that you've written down "ooh the mature approach...🙄" to.accuse someone of being immature and then you pressed send?

Astonishing. Well played. Gave me a good lol.

Yes, yes I did. Because suggesting she doubles down on being ridiculous is a pathetic suggestion.

And I was just trying to reply in the same spirit of your post

Still, I’m glad I gave you a
‘good lol’ and appealed to your ‘sense of humour’