Late night cooking…help me get perspective

[Sassysangria2201]

DSD is 19 and lives at home. She’s at uni so doesn’t pay any board etc. She has a nice set up - seperate part of the house with her own bathroom and sitting room. She has a boyfriend and we don’t have a lot of limits on how often he visits.

She’s generally well behaved but can be very inconsiderate in the house. She will amass dirty dishes in her room and only bring them up when we get annoyed as we are running low. She routinely leaves food encrusted plates next to the dishwasher. She also uses the last of something then puts the empty packet back in the cupboard instead of putting it in the bin.

She and her boyfriend have arrived home and are cooking. At 11.30pm. The kitchen is close to the bedrooms (same level) and I’m now wide awake and fuming.

I’ve had many conversations with DH about consideration around the house, as well as with her, but feel there is an underlying dynamic where she massively over reacts and DH turns it on me. He’s very tidy and grumbles about cleaning up after her but also defends it as ‘she’s just a teenager’ .

i’m so ground down by it that I’ve lost perspective. Putting up with this is utterly crazy right? Or am I?

Maybe treat her as if she lives in uni halls, so has her own cupboard for food, shelf in the fridge, own crockery, pans etc. So if anything needs washing up, replacing she needs to do it

Are you being serious?

How about the OP just enforcing some straightforward house rule rules…

OP has to pick her battles. In her place I would prefer to create a self contained studio flat rather than keep laying down the law. Up to OP of course.

Thus rewarding her for her unacceptable behaviour…

sigh.

That's one way of looking at it. Mine is different, which is fine.

Thanks for all the comments. I think I knew I was not being unreasonable but needed to hear it as I’ve been slowly ground down by both DH and DSD’s dismissive behaviour.

I have thought about whether we could create her a second cooking space but have ruled it out for a few reasons.

There is already a microwave and full fridge down there but she doesn’t use them. She’s unlikely to keep it clean and as it’s the ground floor I’d be concerned about rodents (we live near a small woods so are more prone to them).

Unfortunately plumbing a sink in would be impractical due to location of pipes and general layout. It would also be a grey area with consent laws here (the definition of a kitchen is whether it has a sink) - at best we’d have rip it out and repair if we move, at worst it’d be a hefty fine.

Personally, late night cooking is something I can’t be annoyed about. DD went through that phase and whilst it was annoying to come down to a messy kitchen I’d rather her cook from scratch and a) have the life skills to do so b) not be relying on fast food/microwaveable rubbish. At 19 she’s a grown adult - if she’s hungry then she’s hungry, no matter the time. Use earplugs if you absolutely must. It’s no different than having a partner doing shift work - teens naturally have a later schedule and that’s ok.

The dirty plate thing however does drive me absolutely insane - we’d frequently be running out of cutlery etc as DD would have it all piled up in her room. The only thing that stopped it was real, hard consequences. No clean plates = no access to the car I share with her in our case… It worked and hasn’t happened since.

There’s a name for this.. abuse.

I also agree that creating a second coking area for her is rewarding her behaviour. It gives her the impression that we need to provide a solution for the situation, when the solution is she needs to take some very basic responsibility for herself.

Maybe I’m being harsh, but I find the idea that we would create a self contained flat for DSD (and her boyfriend presumably) a bit nuts. She already has her own entrance, bathroom and sitting room, for free. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that she puts her rubbish in the bin and doesn’t cook a full meal 15 paces from where people are sleeping in the literal middle of the night.

This might not have been clear from my original post, but we live overseas and it’s not like a typical UK house where the kitchen is downstairs. The kitchen is down a very short hallway from the bedrooms on the same level. This is normal here.

I get angry and irritated then remember how slovenly I was when younger etc. Give her realistic rules to follow rather than perfection would be my advice

I have a 14 year old.and the thought of this continuing until they are 19 is

I’m going to hold your hand when I say this… 14 was easy in comparison to late teens/early 20s!!

Your dynamic sounds like mine in that my DH moans but doenst like being the bad guy so will just say that’s what teenagers are like as if that means we don’t say anything.
Its fine to have house rules that a young adult needs to live by - our adult DD is aware that we expect her to shower before 10pm unless some extenuating reason and the same with cooking. She can make the rules when she has her own home.

Totally agree, need to eat after 10pm ..eat a health bar or similar. Consideration is a basic life skill

I worked shifts while flatting for a while If I came home from a shift at 11.30pm I would have a sandwich, heat something up or get a takeaway. My flatmates would not have been happy if I’d have literally started cooking dinner at that hour. Houses here generally have kitchens and bedrooms in same floor though.

Not worth it then. Her messiness is really concerning, if she can't even manage her own fridge hygienically.

How do students normally live in your country? If DS didn't have early morning lectures his daytime shifted by quite a few hours and that continued when home for holidays. He would think nothing of going out at 11pm for a drive, take away etc Gym membership cheaper in unsociable hours, so again could be a midnight gym session. Quite hard for him (and us) to settle back into family life during holidays. He did have a part-time job too in the holidays but that was in hospitality, so again could be coming home late.

I'd include the boyfriend in that tbh, they're both taking the piss. It might embarrass her enough to knock it off.

I am genuinely not understanding what you mean. Do you mean DD would be abusing her parents or vice versa if she was given her own cooking space so that she can cook when she chooses and her parents don't get disturbed? It just seems a practical solution.

You can’t banish a grown adult from their own kitchen. How you don’t seem to see an issue with that is baffling.

The thing that annoyed me most when DSS was doing this - making a full english at all hours of the night - was that DH wasn't on board with me. It actually got easier once he also found it intensely irritating - (about month 3).

Then we had a sensible conversation the 3 of us because it wasn't me against them...and laid down some ground rules. Which in our case was - if you've used teh last thing of something at least let us know - and shut the kitchen door so the smell of bacon didn't drift up the stairs.

I quite miss it now....

I am not suggesting banishing her. She could go in the kitchen to chat to her family and eat meals with them. Just not to cook at inconvenient times and keep them awake, and leave a mess for them to clean up.

I can’t edit my post but she lives with us full time and goes to uni locally.

If it was just the hols I could probably suck it up.

She will go out at those hours and that’s fine - occasionally I’ll get woken up by her returning as where she parks her car is by our bedroom window, but that’s fine as it’s not something she can overly help and I get students keep different hours. Students here either flat or live with their parents - we have less of a late night culture in general )work starts at 8.30am as standard, lots of offices start earlier)

Does she do other chores? Not even bothering to put the washing up in the dishwasher would deeply annoy me. Has she ever been expected to load the dishwasher.
What about laundry? Do you cook or buy food in for her?
Do you have a maid or cleaner? We used to have a maid but I think it made my kids more conscious of being tidy and respectful rather than less as they would have hated the thought that the maid would have had extra work because of them.
I think I’d set up a meeting with her and your husband. Have a list of things to discuss and try and come up with a plan.

I think that, maybe, you are not consistent enough and let her get away with it most the time so that when you do crack down it comes across as you being fussy or in a bad mood. I’d be tempted to really crack down on it.