Guest post written by Nicole Gardiner. Nicole is passionate about topics related to home improvement, cleaning and organizing and owns a small cleaning company based in London.
As ridiculous as it may sound, when people are having trouble with distributing the chores around their home, it sometimes leads to an unhappy and fighting family. Whatever the family is, weather it’s just two people with or without kids, the dedication to maintaining their home shouldn’t be eighty percent one person and five or ten for the rest. Everyone should give one-hundred percent of themselves, and everything will be so much easier. This of course does not turn into a math problem. You do not need to add more people to your family, you can have as few kids as you want and as many partners…. Or housemates as you wish.
To start things off, gather everyone for a family meeting. Get a notepad, open a spreadsheet on a mobile device or your laptop and start discussing chores. List all of the chores that are usually done in the home including errands. Also add small things as well, like replacing the toilet paper, filling up the ice tray and turning on the water heater. Get everyone to start throwing chores at you (figuratively) and you write them down. After that, add all of them on a spreadsheet and work together to figure out if everything is okay or something needs to be added and when everything is complete, print the spreadsheet and give everyone a copy.
The next step is discussing how everyone feels about the cleaning chores and how regularly they think, that one has to be done. You could be surprised when you hear everyone’s ideas or you could be unimpressed from their predictability. The important part is that this is happening, everyone just needs to stick together. You need to know that people have different levels of tolerance for lets say, dirty dishes. One person might go crazy by seeing a frying pan and two plates in the sink while others might leave them to soak for a little too long. Now, sorry to break it to you, but you may also have a fault in the discourse. If you are the one who constantly cleans, you might want to loosen up a bit. Plus, the rest of your family will notice that something is wrong and you will immediately become the center of attention with an abundance of suggestions from everyone, asking if you need help with the chores.
If you are distributing chores to your kids, allow them to pick the easy ones. Do not force your child to do some ridiculous task like cleaning up the oven or washing windows. Mind their age and let them pick something that is appropriate for them. This is also a good way to motivate your kids to continue doing chores further down the road. And we all know how complicated it is to get kids to even clean their rooms. Do things like this, and you will potentially have little helpers until they grow up and move out.
When everyone has placed their name on a chore, it is time to make the schedule. If someone doesn’t like something, they should speak up, that includes yourself as well. If there is something that someone wants to change, discuss it and then change it. You all need to feel like a team, everyone backing each other up, you are a family after all. The most important thing in a relationship is communication. And it is so much better to correct something on a piece of paper than to fight over it in the future.
What are your household chores tips and tricks? Does your family use a chart to organize chores?
Have a beautiful day !
We definitely don’t have a chart in our home for chores, and as the post says we usually end up in an argument about who does what! Ha ha, I guess delegating and agreeing before hand is much better idea I think I’ll give the family meeting and chart a go!
So many helpful tips! thanks for sharing
Thanks for reading Samantha
Love the idea of letting the kids pick the easy chores. This is what my mom did when I was growing up and it worked.
Same ! As I got older my chores were picked for me but when I was really young this is the “system ” that we used !
Great idea! My spouse and me get into a “conversation” about chores ever two to three months. This would definitely help.
Great suggestions on the chores! We are a family of 3 in a small home with 5 animals to boot so chores are a constant!
Oh wow ! Yea that sounds like a lot of work girl !
We have a chore chart but honestly, right now, we’re in survival mode and probably will be until school gets out for winter break. I’ve gotta get back on track.
Well making a chores chart is difficult task, spreading work among each member according to their age & making them agree on it is really work.Thanks for sharing so we have an idea how to do it.