Has anyone actually sat down with partner, listed all the household chores and successfully shared them out? Or is this a fairytale up there with Sleeping Beauty and Snow White?

[hattyyellow]

DH doing much less around the house than I do. We both work and currently I'm doing more hours, but still picking up practically all of the housework, cooking, domestic admin. Reading online everywhere seems to suggest that we do a long list of all the tasks needing doing, then divide them.

Has anyone done this? Does it really work?

Any thoughts appreciated!

I haven't done that, but I do believe it's possible to make sure the tasks are fairly divided - whether you do that by having a planning meeting, or by saying "I'm fed up of this - as of now I want you to do X,Y and Z", or whatever depends how your relationship works really. A long list + planning meeting might work for some people, but it would feel odd to me.

Dh and I split it without any complaint.
Actually he does more than me and I am reigning him in. He thinks that household chores are so dull they need to be shared even though I am idle don't have that much to do compared to many others

Me and my dh did this when we last moved house - i'd just gone back to work so it was good timing for a rethink. In fact he came up with the idea - i work from home and if we're not careful then i end up doing loads of stuff in the house partly as procrastination and partly by habit, which ends up making me stressed and resentful (even though i'm doing it voluntarily, iyswim!).

It has worked really well. The house is tidier and the amount of nagging from both of us has also decreased. An interesting side effect is that whereas before I was doing most of the traditional "housewife" roles (washing, cooking) and he was doing "male" roles (DIY, fixing the bikes, gardening) we've now mixed it up a lot. We don't keep a written list like a reward chart or something, we just made an informal kind of agreement and if it needs to change for whatever reason that's ok. It's more about attitude and recognising/valuing everything that goes into running the house.

One thing to remember when you divide stuff up is that often even if the work is delegated (ie "you do the bathroom", "i change the bedlinen") there is often an element of mental admin that goes with it - eg realising that the insurance needs renewing, or remembering that we've run out of bleach, or knowing what needs using first in the fridge. It can be really hard to separate these things 50/50 for obvious reasons, but they can cause a bit of stress at first. Also try to say thank you to each other - the list isn't supposed to be used to scapegoat each other for our failings.

This was long, sorry. Good luck!

We have never sat down and said who does what but we both know what needs doing and when it needs doing and get on with it.
It's been like that since day 1.

He washes, pegs out, irons the boys uniform, hoovers, does the boys homework with them, polishes shoes, etc etc. So do I.

The main thing he does that I don't is get the big shop in, sew the boys scout badges and name tags, polishes the woodburners,and sort the cars out.

The main things I do that he doesn't is baking, buy the birthday presents and cards (but he has done if asked) and clean the bathroom.

We are both OK with how the house ticks over.
Sometimes I do more than him because of his working day may be long.
Sometimes he does more than me because sometimes I work away.

We did this, years ago when we were first married and I was young and naive. I wrote the list. I hadn't accounted for DH's then hidden ability to tolerate Olympic amounts of shit, filth, mess and cack. So he got the list and carefully struck through all the ones which he deemed to be unimportant.

All I can say is, he never let us run out of toilet roll.

I think even if you wrote a list, if OH doesn't care about mess, it wouldn't make a difference. Thankfully for me, my DH is a bigger clean freak than I am. I still don't know where the on button is on the hoover. But he doesn't know where the washing up liquid lives. I'm not sure when it was decided that I always do the washing up, but if it means never having to vacuum, I'm pretty happy. We split chores pretty 50/50 timewise, but he tends to do all the heavy, sweaty stuff so I cannot complain.