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.

So true!!

This or I would put them in a separate bag and ask him NOT to wash items in that bag. I note it isn't his first failure so must be a slow learner or doesn't care. Ask him to buy something you find on Vinted or go online to a Cashmere store and ask him to buy it. Since I do the laundry I know it won't happen here but the other family members know only to wash what they knowTell him you put a chip in the wood on one his guitars and see what happens. Lots of guitars on eBay and people available to repaint them

Yes to separate baskets. I do this for all my blacks:band shirts which get washed on delicate inside out and never tumble dried.

I never understand joint finances. I would hate this, surely it builds resentment if one person id frittering money. But replace the jumpers. Tell him not to touch the jumper clothes basket and wash them yourself

I hate to sound unsympathetic, but I was thinking along these lines.

Buy another laundry bag to keep delicates separate from the main laundry load.

DON'T LET HIM DO YOUR LAUNDRY. Problem solved.

She asked him not to.

He did it anyway.

Problem created.

I’ve been going back over this thread and re-reading some of the answers and reflecting. Most people seem to agree that I am at fault and it’s was unreasonable of me to expect my DH to separate my jumper out- and also that I am unreasonable or rather, unrealistic, to expect him to put right his mistake.

It has also made me think about how laundry is done in general. In our house, we have a fairly decent sized hamper. There’s no way you’re going to fit everything in the hamper in the machine in one load, so there will always, no matter who is doing the laundry, be an element of sorting out to do. There will always be certain things taken out and then put back in again, whether that’s because there’s not enough of that colour to justify a load or certain things get washed at a higher/lower temp than others. Or maybe you just need all the school uniform stuff picked out and prioritised on a Sunday evening. So flagging something that shouldn’t be washed and therefore sorted out of the main laundry did not seem to me to be beyond the realms of reasonable or beyond my DH’s capability. But it seems my assumption that most people do laundry like me is incorrect, and many people just haul out armfuls and stick it all in on a 40 cycle.

Firstly, all these people blaming you for him ruining your jumpers are nuts. It's his fault.

Secondly, I wouldn't trust him to source a "nice" jumper at TKMaxx or Vinted. I would buy a new one at the retail price and let him be the person to save £80 on the next buys for his wardrobe.

@feralwoman bras go into bra bags as they go into the laundry. Everyone is responsible for emptying their pockets before items go into the laundry. If something has a stain, it gets set aside in a separate pile to be treated and can be added to the hamper if appropriate. Items are presorted into the correct bins for the correct type of wash.

The tip and wash system is sacred.

Someone in the family expecting others to check their pockets or inspect for stains instead of reporting in advance means they don’t respect other people’s time.

Absolute bullshit.

In our house, there's one washing basket and we both work our way through it. Neither of us damage each others' clothes because we pay attention to the labels and/or anything new/unusual/woollen (big clue if it's woollen that it shouldn't go through a normal wash.)

Occasionally, over our nearly forty years together, we have damaged each others' clothes. In this case, we apologise, replace it and don't do it again.

There is no massive mental load because we are both careful about each others' things because we want each other to have nice things. It's not hard

So why can't he fucking do it?

With most of the other posters. We're a family of 7. I have 4 washing bins next to eacother. Whites, darks, coloured and misc. Any delicates go in misc. You're annoyed he hasn't learned after 4 mistakes but you've not learned either.
I would not want tons of family money spent on replacing the items. I think you should just keep searching yourself (which is obviously part of the enjoyment in this hobby of yours) and then he should pay. And then you should have a separate washing bin in your room away from the main washing bins to keep these items away from DH.

I agree with this! If clothes are in the washing basket they go in the wash. I'm not sorting through the basket looking for delicates - if DH doesn't want something in the normal wash he knows not to put it in the washing basket.

Exactly all this

We have small kids so generally stuff does have to be checked. I found a rotten half eaten apple in my DD1s pocket once. DD2 went through a phase of collecting stones. Someone’s always got a tissue in their pocket.

I don’t think your analogy is quite right. It’s more like leaving my laptop on the floor of a room which I use regularly and my DH uses once every 6 weeks, (if that) My DH telling me that he’s going to go in that room and me warning him to be careful please because my laptop is on the floor in there and he’s already stood on 4 already, so please don’t stand on the 5th one.

I think it's on both of you- he should definitely be more careful (especially since you told him to leave your things) but it's also not a good idea to be putting delicates in the main basket, even though you're sorting it sometimes things can get missed (and no, we aren't all just throwing handfuls of laundry in without checking)
Either way it sounds like he was sorry and trying to find you a replacement, so i'd get a new jumper and another laundry basket for delicates and move on.

I guess I’ve just never considered it before, or had any reason to believe he may be ND 🤷🏻‍♀️

Your DH sounds lovely ☺️

In this instance I wasn’t really expecting him to memorise what my clothes are all made of or check all the labels. I just asked him to remove any of my clothes that he came across and not wash them.

I’d be frustrated too about such an item being ruined - never mind it being the 4th time.

I do appreciate what many posters and yourself are saying about your DH essentially being careless and/using weaponised incompetence.

From you posts it sounds like this is about more than jumpers (laptops/tickets etc).

Tbh before you posted about the other things I did have some empathy for your DH.

We have a general single laundry basket and share doing the washing. However DH has no clothes that would require any “special” washing.

I on the other hand do. I suppose my take on this has been that in choosing some clothing that requires special treatment, it’s also my responsibility to manage that separately to general clothing so I have a separate small laundry bag in the utility room I pop those items in that DH knows not to touch.

So whilst I understand you told him not to touch your washing I can see how it’s possible for your items to get mixed in when frankly the idea (and probably cost) of these items just doesn’t register with him in the moment.

In that sense I’d argue it’s just as much your responsibility to look after special items by separating them out as it is to look out for them.

However, it doesn’t seem like this is an isolated issue. Rather, it’s an ongoing lack of taking care/responsibility in multiple aspects of daily life when not actively involving tasks/items he cares about.

That’s more worrying, in the sense it’s an overall patten of general disrespect and dare I say flippancy towards you in the sense he doesn’t care about the time/cost/annoyance his lack of effort in engaging his brain causes you.

I wonder how precious he is about his own belongings (things he cares about) and his ability to remember to do tasks that he is invested in for himself?

If he’s generally scatterbrained across the board then he should be employing better strategies to organise himself.

On the other hand if he is perfectly capable of managing/organising “his important” tasks and looking after his own things to a high standard yet only functions on a sub par setting in relation to you/your children then you’ve got a bigger problem.

We are mostly aligned when it comes to money. He likes nice guitars and music equipment, I like nice clothes and we will both try to source these cheaper/2nd hand where possible. I would feel guilty spending a hundred odd pounds on something like a jumper, unless I was using birthday money or something like that ( even at that, I’d probs still baulk)

He doesn’t like being criticised so he’s happy to spend £165 of family money on this to make the problem go away and to feel like he’s fixed it.

It’s more like leaving my laptop on the floor of a room which I use regularly and my DH uses once every 6 weeks

The whole point of that analogy is that the laptop shouldn't be on the floor in the first place!.. It's careless and risky for you to leave something in a place it can be accidentally stood on.. you are responsible for keeping your items safe.. same goes with your laundry. You'd be stupid to keep leaving your laptop on the floor if it's already been trod on 4 times before (even though you've told people not to) so why do you keep leaving it there? Madness.

FWIW in our house, we have whites (which we pre-soak), colours, darks, towels/blankets/bedding etc. None of that is sorted out before hand it is all chucked in to the same hamper until there is enough for a full load.. what we DON'T DO is put in handwash or delicate items with everything else, they have a separate bag, me & DH both do equal shares of laundry, but it would be too easy for things to get thrown in the wash with any of the above, so we keep them completely separate.

Besides, it's annoying putting things in the hamper then asking your DH to root through all the dirty clothes to find them and take them out again, I'd be well cheesed off if my DH was doing this, when he could just taken responsibility and kept the items separate himself.

We had one of those laundry baskets that is in sections, so you can have one for delicates, which might avoid the issue next time (no, it doesn't help right now!).
But once the kids weren't very little, I just got a basket for each person. It means that we all do our own, so can keep an eye on stuff like this (obvs the kids have nothing delicate). This might work better, as if he just does his own stuff, it's not your problem any more.

This is a very lovely reply, thank you. I will be following this advice ☺️

But he has to root through it anyway to sort out what’s going to be prioritised to be washed. It all won’t fit so it has to be sorted through and put into piles of similar type items. Asking him to not wash xyz feels, to me, like a simple, clear instruction that an adult should be capable of following. I shouldn’t have to get up from my work to supervise this or take-over.

He didn’t have to spot what they were made of though, he only had to spot that they were mine. I didn’t say don’t wash the cashmere. I said not to wash my clothes. Given that there’s only me, him and two children in the house, this should have been straightforward. My clothes are quite different in appearance to his and our DDs.