My workload has dropped SO much since I separated from my roommate (and her dog!) and moved into a building in better repair.  No more piles of dog hair, practically no dust buildup, no more mounds of someone else’s dishes to wash.  Plus the apartment management takes care of all the exterior stuff like snow shoveling—all I have to do is dig my car out once in a while.

I actually don’t mind housework when I’m only cleaning up after myself—I usually do an ok job of cleaning up as I go so nothing ever gets too bad.  Really the worst part of the previous arrangement was that I would spend my cleaning time thinking “ARGH why am I cleaning YOUR dog’s hair???”  Really not a helpful attitude, especially since intellectually I know that we were actually doing about even amounts of cleaning work overall.  The world is a much better place with me not being a housewife—I’m pretty sure I’d be a quivering mass of repressed anger and resentment.  Thanks feminism! :D

Grocery shopping was a “date night” activity for my SO and I during graduate school, and we still do it together.  I do a lot of the cooking (which I don’t think you listed), because I’m particular about what I eat and he isn’t.  Every Sunday morning I do laundry and iron (also because I’m particular about that) while watching the political talk shows… in exchange, he cleans the bathrooms, which in my opinion equals everything that I do!

The dishes, period.

Cleaning the bathtub/shower. So much reaching and wet and yuck. Even with this scrubby-sponge-on-a-stick thing I have, which makes it easier, but it still sucks. Mopping floors is a close second.

Vacuuming is my worst, no doubt. And I usually do it because it’s mostly picking up my cat’s hair. I will say, the vacuuming thing is much better since we got the super-duper Dyson.

Everything else, we pretty much split. We’re both pretty good about cleaning as we go, so the kitchen never gets out of control. I probably start more loads of laundry, but he’s better about hearing the dinger and getting it out of the dryer before it becomes a wrinkled mess. In the bathroom, he routinely cleans the tub (which I hate doing), and I scrub the toilets (which, oddly enough, I don’t mind). 

What helps us is that we keep the common spaces tidy, but we each have our own offices, which we allow to get wildly messy.

I enjoy cleaning the bathroom, yardwork, doing the dishes, cooking, and laundry.  But I don’t enjoy putting my clothes away.  Either it’s a mental block related to my “I wear the same stuff each week anyway” syndrome or a case of extreme laziness/slobbishness, but I just don’t put my clothes away.  I don’t make the bed for the same reason: I’ll just get in it again in the morning.  I’ve got a clean house, but it’s got stuff everywhere.

But if I was taking care of more than just myself, other people’s clutter would drive me nuts.  I’m a clutter hypocrite in that way, but I can live with that.  Except when I clean everything twice a year.  Kicking and screaming, but I do it.

In spite of having been married for 25 years, we are still in college-room-mate-mode.  That is, when it gets to you, you do it.  If the other person does it first, it’s okay to apologize, but it’s also okay to not apologize.

Of course, now that our kids have grown up and left home, there’s a lot less of “it” to get to us.  We’re kind of born-again slobs.

Ironing, hands down
Yard work is worse, but I pay my neigbors kid to do it

Absolute least favorite, no questions about it, is removing clogs of hair from the shower drain.

I have waist-length hair, so this tends to need doing every so often, and it never fails to be a gag-inducing nightmare in which the thirty or so seconds it takes to actually pull it out, move it to the wastebasket, and cover it with approximately half a box of tissues extends into five or ten minutes of wanting to get as far away from the bathroom as possible but having to hover over the toilet instead, just in case.

I’m gagging just thinking about it.

In all honesty, I’d personally rather pull up the shower floor and replace the first foot or two of pipe every time the drain clogs up (thus keeping the clog *inside* the removed drainpipe) than deal with having it tangibly in my presence.

Also making the list is cleaning up the cats’ vomit and hairballs (for similar, if somewhat less severe, reasons), and should I ever have to deal with vomit in any other capacity that will probably tie.

In the category of Things That Do Not Make Me Retch, covering up the air conditioner for winter is my least favorite chore for its physical unpleasantness: it ALWAYS gets left until it’s quite bitterly cold outside, and ours involves a ridiculous contraption of padding, cloth, tarp, and twine such that it takes some forty-five minutes atop a ladder, in the wind (there’s always wind), with thin enough gloves to allow for precise hand-movements and knot-tying, trying to get the thing established properly.  If it goes on wrong, chances are it comes loose midwinter and has to be redone, in even wrose weather.

In our house, I cook, clean the kitchen, do all the grocery shopping, mow the lawn in the summer and rake the leaves in the winter, and split the laundry.  And I tend to the pets.  My wife keeps things picked up (mostly our kids’ mess), dusts and vacuums, cleans the bathroom, and splits the laundry.

Mopping is probably my least favorite chore, just because it seems impossible to keep the mop from getting gross.

For some reason, I hate to empty the dishwasher. I’d rather do dishes than empty the dishwasher. Seriously. When my husband isn’t around to empty it, I just hand-wash the dishes. I have no idea why I hate it so much.

We generally trade off cooking and doing the dishes. Shopping gets done by whoever has time that week. I do bathrooms because it would take my husband about three months to even notice how gross they are.

My husband does all the sorting and piling and organizing because I find it so daunting that it will prevent me from getting to the rest of the cleaning. I then say that we really should develop a system to deal with the mail and papers as they come in so we don’t have to do this, and then neither of us ever does.

I sweep. He mops because he is very, very good at it due to working as a janitor in college. (Our last house had white tile, and I always left it all covered with gray streaks from the dirty mop water. Not him.)

I do most of the laundry. My husband does the limited ironing we do (he has to look more professional at work than I do, so ... his clothes, he irons). We’re both terrible about folding and putting away, but if it gets done at all, it’s cause I did it.

He gives our son his bath. I tuck him in and read him his stories.

I’m unemployed right now so I do all the chores & kid stuff. Since she makes the $$ the wife pays the bills. The only thing i hate hate hate is having to empty the dishwasher. I’d rather wash them by hand then empty the thing, though I don’t have the luxury of ignoring it right now. I would outsource that in a second.

For those who hate vacuuming, especially those of you with pets, I cannot recommend the Roomba enough.  I got mine a few years ago and I haven’t owned a regular vacuum since.  The one I have now I’ve scheduled to run daily while I’m at work.  It’s like living in the future, I swear.

Now, granted, I do live in a studio, so there’s just the one room for it to vacuum, but it’s not a big deal to move it from room to room.

Kyra, you might want to get one of those plastic hair trap that fit over the shower drain.
I have one of those and remove the hair that gets captured there (not down the drain) every so often. I have long hair (shoulder length) and it works great. Saves me some $$ on Drain-o. It’s only about $3 -$4 too.

I hate taking out the garbage—it’s the only chore I shirk without shame. I resent cleaning the toilet because I’m not the person who leaves dribbles of pee on the underside of the seat. Other cleaning chores I really don’t mind, and my partner and I split them up depending on our mood; luckily, neither of us minds the mess that accumulates from time to time.

Kyra, I have hair down to my bum, and I find that it’s only when my hands are running through it (shampooing, or finger-combing through conditioner) that it sheds.  So rather than letting it fall on the floor and go down the drain to get all disgusting, I stick it to the wall of the shower (wet hair sticks to tile surprisingly well), or put it on the edge of the soap dish.  Then I take it with me as I get out of the shower and throw it in the bin.  I still have to touch it, but it’s clean, because it’s just been shampooed!  And I’ve lived in my current place for three years now, and have never had to remove clogs from the drain or pour drain-cleaner down to clear it out, because not enough hair goes down to clog it up.

I don’t have a dishwasher, so maybe I’m an idiot to suggest this, but I wonder if the problem for those who hate to empty it is that the dishwasher is at your feet while most of the dishes go above waist level?  It’s like picking apples from the ground and putting them back in a tree, whereas emptying them from the sink is much easier on the back and hips.  I have emptied a few in my time, and one of the other problems is that the open door is a tripping hazard (in some kitchens) when trying to put things up high.  Yes, yes, transition them to the countertop first, then to the cupboards.  But that’s another pain in the ass.

I don’t think we’ll see countertop dishwashers anytime soon, but apparently there’s a need.

dishes.

I’m a horrible slob, so that all other chores are done so ridiculously rarely it just doesn’t bother me. but dishes are unavoidable for longer than a couple days.

Cleaning behind the toilet.  Anything where you have to get on your hands and knees.  I forget what feminist said it, but someone said that a misogynist must have designed the toilet to make it sit away from the wall.  *shudder*

Seconding the Roomba.  If you have carpet with deep pile, you may still have to follow up, but like twice a year.  The only thing I ever have to do is use the vacuum to get the baseboards, and steam clean our throw rugs on occasion.

I wonder why toilets are designed to fit onto the floor only.  I see some institutional toilets in public restrooms that go to the wall, so there isn’t that strange, hard-to-clean gap in the back.  Why not install such things in homes?

And as the father of three sons, I think a waterless urinal makes some sense in the home, no matter what real estate agents and others would say.

I’m single, so whatever it is, I either do it myself, pay someone to do it, or it does not get done. I used to go for “not done”, but over time I have become finicky, so I dedicate two or three hours every Sunday to chores. Which has the advantages that nothing ever gets into the “now it’s too disgusting to clean” state.

My least favorite chores are mopping the floor (sweeping is fine, but the dirty water is icky, and it never gets clean in the corners), dusting (because I’m slightly allergic to dust—not a problem when it’s just lying around peacefully, but when I disturb is an get it in my eyes, the trouble starts), and cleaning the toilet (just because). Also, window cleaning (more dirty water, plus, I never get them as clean as I want them). Which is why I have someone come in and to those tasks. She can do in two hours what takes me all day, and it gets cleaner.

Tidying up I dislike. Usually stuff accumulates on flat surfaces until it makes me angry, then I try to put it away, only to discover that stuff has bred like rabbits while I did not watch and will not fit into the storage space anymore. That means, decluttering time again. And because I feel that just putting it in the trash is a waste and immoral, I need to at least make attempts to find a new home for everything, and recycle whatever possible. Which is the most emotionally draining chore of all.

I wipe down the bathtub and the shower every time after I use them, when everything is still damp, and I have a towel in hand that needs to go into the wash anyways. I have a sieve-like hair trap in the drain, because as Kyra said, getting hair out of the drain = yuck. (I put one of those in the kitchen drain, too. It’s amazing what it catches.)

I like doing laundry, because I like to handle fabric. All the steps: sorting, hanging to dry, folding. When I buy clothes I buy some that I really like to touch. I do not iron, because I fail at it. Those of my shirts that need ironing are going to the cleaners who will iron them for 2 Euro a shirt.

Washing the dishes is dead boring, but no hardship, and the transformation from “chaotic dirty kitchen” to “tidy clean kitchen” that can be effected by nothing more than doing the dishes, putting the trash in the bin and wiping the surfaces is very satisfying. My kitchen work areas are 10 cm higher than “standard”, which saves me a lot of backaches. 

I have nothing against taking out the garbage in principle (removing unwanted stuff is good), but our garbage container is too small for the apartment block: It’s full after one week, and gets emptied after two. So for one week in two, taking out the garbage means to throw the bag on the top of the container and hope it sticks.

Doing bills is only hard when I cannot pay. Caring for and cleaning up after the cats is no effort, especially since the new kitties have healthy stomachs and are house-trained. Grocery shopping and cooking I actually enjoy.

All outside work is done by some janitor/gardening service.

Cleaning the bathrooms. I am the sole female in our household with a husband and three sons, 21, 19, and 16. Do the math.

Yes, I delegate that chore to them, but they are not the most efficient toilet/shower/sink scrubbers and it’s a bathroom in constant use. Sigh. Rubber gloves, face mask, and knee pads.

I hate yardwork. It seems so pointless. Luckily it’s winter now.

My spouse does the sweeping and mopping, because I truly don’t see it; I tend to handle the dishwasher, we both cook, she does most of the laundry, I do the garbage collection. But all of that really pales next to the offspring, whether waking up when the youngest does, or changing diapers without too much mayhem, or toy patrol, or politely explaining that endlessly shouting “I’m lonely!” is not a good post-bedtime activity…

Cleaning the guck out of the kitchen drain.  I need to post a sign: The Sink Is Not a Garbage.

Pots and pans and other things that can’t go in the dishwasher.  Hate.  And it’s never ending.  And bathroom cleaning.  Lucky for me, Grolby cleans the bathroom.  Which sometimes means it doesn’t happen for a while.  Ditto pots and pans—he’s usually supposed to clean those, as I do all the cooking, and she who cooks does not clean, but he often leaves them in the sink for a while. 

I don’t mind doing yard work.  It’s outside, uses oft-neglected muscles, and doesn’t need to be done as often.

And I will say that even when we were both in school and working, I still did most of the housework.  Even if the actual work-work was nearly split in two, I was the one who always made shopping lists or got the weekly cleaning into motion.  So the mental housework, almost all me.  Now that I’m unemployed and Grolby is a full-time grad student, I most stuff, end of story.  He cleans the bathroom and mops every few weeks, and we almost always do shopping and laundry (at a laundromat) together.  I do most of the cooking, except on the weekends, when I can usually rope him into doing some.  I empty the dishwasher, and he’s supposed to fill it and turn it on, and that sometimes actually even happens.  He takes out the garbage and recycling, but again, usually only when I ask.  I vacuum. 

This is really not working for me.  I hate the tedium, and I hate cleaning up after him, especially because he’s messier than I am.  He’s going to have to pick it up once I get a full-time job, and I don’t see that going smoothly.  I think we will probably hire a cleaner; with two incomes and a small place, we’ll be able to afford it.

I resent cleaning the toilet because I’m not the person who leaves dribbles of pee on the underside of the seat.

This!  A thousand times this!

Dishes…the dishwasher makes life livable.  I don’t get the people who don’t like emptying it.  I tend to put it off until I have to load it again, but it’s so much better than washing by hand, which I despise with the fury of a thousand suns.  The dishwasher has a time so I set it to go off at night, and in the morning, magic clean dishes!

Mopping?  I. Just. Don’t. Do. It.

Ironing?  I don’t do it b/c my clothes all are Mom-casual and any wrinkles will fall out while wearing.  But I don’t mind it.  Sometimes I’ll iron all the girls’ dresses for fun.  Luckily, I’m married to a slob who is obsessive about ironing and takes care of that himself.  I HATE the fact he never puts the ironing board away, though, so our current method is using it as a sidetable behind the couch and pulling it out for ironing.

The kids are getting big enough to help out some as opposed to just messing everything up.  I don’t mind dusting, and I think that’s b/c my mom HATES dusting, so she made me do it as a small child.  We had a coffee table with drawers in the middle and openings on either end with scrollwork.  I used to crawl all over it getting all the nooks and crannies clean. 

Somehow, I don’t think that forcing the kids to clean the bathroom will make them love cleaning bathrooms, though.

mopping: the maid does this.
dishwasher duty:  the nanny, i think.
bathroom:  the maid.
groceries:  two supermarkets within 500ft.  someone gets staples, not sure who.
ironing:  dry cleaner within 100ft.  I think the maid drops stuff off there.

You think? You don’t even know how your stuff gets done. Holy privilege, Batman!

Kyra, a cheap set of needle-nosed pliers will allow you to grab the vast majority of the hair from the drain without having to actually touch it.

3letterjon wrote:

I wonder why toilets are designed to fit onto the floor only.  I see some institutional toilets in public restrooms that go to the wall, so there isn’t that strange, hard-to-clean gap in the back.  Why not install such things in homes?

Doable enough, and it uses higher pressure water to boot, so everything goes down, but you have to have a reinforced support system for the bowl to hold it.  You’d have to assume a load of about 600 pounds at the end of an extension—even if you don’t weigh that much, building codes assume that there are some very heavy people in the world, and you don’t know who will live in the home next—and have a support system capable of supporting that much force, applied in one direction, without moving, and do so over time.  You can figure, right from the start, that wood framing will not meet the standards, because wood can move over time.

Paul wrote:

I hate yardwork. It seems so pointless. Luckily it’s winter now.

Yeah, which meant I had the pleasure of shoveling the 2½ inches of snow we got overnight.  :(

Koobickle wrote:

Cleaning the guck out of the kitchen drain.  I need to post a sign: The Sink Is Not a Garbage.

One of our daughters—who, at 21 and 18 ought to know better—did what she was supposed to dop, and put her dirty plate in the sink.  Only it was a paper plate.

Holy privilege, Batman!

Not to make an issue over it, but “calling out” privilege always makes me ask, “What’s your point?”  Because if one should give up privileges others don’t have, then we could all start by abandoning our comfortable Western lifestyles.  It’s not a substitute for genuinely fighting oppression.

I am not a huge fan of most chores, but I actually enjoy laundry, minus the lugging of clothes up and down 2 flights of stairs, which is difficult for me because I have osteoarthritis. Aside from that, I love folding clothes, and even more than that, I enjoy hanging clothes on the clothesline. But now that it’s winter, I’m hanging them in the basement instead, and that’s not as enjoyable.

I hate putting away the clean dishes in the dishwasher, but I don’t mind other dish related tasks.

I don’t like dusting, and you can tell. I sweep instead of vacuum, but we don’t have any carpets. I’m not a fan of that, either. And I hate shoveling snow, which is how I spent a significant chunk of my morning.

Straightening Up. hands down.

I have a small(medium?) apartment and everything else vaccuming/etc, takes hardly any time at all once the clutter is out of the way. But the clutter itself is a bitch to handle. Things get SO messy so quickly and I can never keep everything put away for some reason. Even when it’s relatively neat, there’s always at least several piles of *stuff* building up at the edges to get in the way. Every flat surface (bookshelves, television, floor) is subject to the clutter and it gets bad. Doesn’t help that I often procrastinate out of despair over the prospect of actually doing anything.

second least favorite? Cleaning the Kitchen floor/other hard floors.  I should really buy a mop but I’m mop-less at this point so it’s a hands-and-knees affair until further notice.

I do my dusting with a vacuum.

Although, my least favorite is sweeping.  So much fibers and hair and carpet pieces cruftup the floor that vacuuming will just kill the vacuum brush!

I am going to go with laundry. My wife and I do our laundry at her parents house. It’s only about a 15 min drive, but by the time I pack up the clothes bring them to the “laundromat”, wash them and bring them home, I am done with clothes. Then the battle is who’s gonna fold the damn things and put them away.

I actually kinda like shoveling snow and even chipping ice now and then. We’ve only got about a foot on the ground at this point. And thanks to attentive clearing no hump in front of the garage…

And in addition to the flushometer-style wall-hung toliets (which require at least 50 psi of water pressure, sometimes more) there are tank-based ones as well. It’s not quite accurate to say that they can’t go in a wood-framed wall; both kinds come with a metal attachment frame about 4’ high that goes into a newly built wall, and the wall is going to be thicker than the usual 2x4 framed kind simply by the fact that it has a 4” waste pipe inside it, possibly plus elbows. The reasons they’re rare: a) new construction or renovation only, no, uh, dropin replacement of existing toilets; b) expensive as fsck—flushometer valves alone cost about as much as a conventional toilet, and the fancy ones with in-wall tanks cost several times that.

Least favorite is definitely vacuuming, though it’s grown all out of proportion - I had to do it earlier this week and honestly it wasn’t THAT bad.  In actual reality of which tasks I actively hate doing, it’s got to be cleaning out the fridge. I will do almost anything to avoid cleaning out the fridge.

Laundry always seems to loom large, not because I hate doing it so much but because the laundry situation is so bad.  I would do just about anything to have my own washer/dryer - it’s probably the only luxury of suburban life that I really miss.

Oh, and re the division of labor - my roommate and I share the chores pretty well.  After a few years of living together, and due to the fact that we’re pretty complimentary in terms of likes/hates and things we’re good or bad about, we have a system that works.

I’m worried, however, about the possibility of my boyfriend and I moving in together.  Mainly because from what I can tell he neither cooks nor cleans, and in my opinion you have to be able to handle one or the other.  I’m predicting lots of “I AM NOT YOUR FUCKING MOTHER!” arguments if we ever decide to go that route.

I do most of the cooking (although he does feed the kids on evenings when I work), dishes and other kitchen cleaning, laundry, and general de-cluttering.  He does all floors, takes out the trash, cleans the litterbox (his cats, I’d just as soon not have pets), and dusts.  We alternate on the bathroom—I usually scrub the tub/shower, he does the toilet and floor.  He bathes the kids and I tuck them in to bed, again on evenings when I don’t work.  We split yardwork pretty evenly—he cuts the grass and shovels snow, I do most of the rest, with help from the kids. 

Soon the kids will be tall enough to reach the cabinets to put things away, and when that happens, I won’t have to load/unload the dishwasher or wash pots and pans anymore.  Right now, the oldest helps with folding laundry (which I hate) and feeds the cats. The youngest is 4 and he likes to “help” but he usually just makes more work to do.

The thing I hate worse than anything is trash and litter box duty.  I have a very strong gag reflex and I just can’t take it.

I only really hate litter box duty. But the cat is so damn grateful she almost makes up for it…almost.

Re: roombas: do they not get the corners/along the walls areas? Because that is where the cat fur tumbleweeds nest, and if the roomba isn’t going to get those, then it’s useless to me…

Folding laundry, hands down.  I once lived with a woman who hated DOING the laundry (schlepping it down the road to the coin-op facility) but didn’t mind / possibly enjoyed folding it.  That was a good division of labor.  Our friends made fun of us for our orderly sock drawers.

Re: toilets bolted to walls, I once heard John Popper of Blues Traveler describe the moment when he decided to lose some weight, because the support of said toilet failed on him while he was mid-process.

Not to make an issue over it, but “calling out” privilege always makes me ask, “What’s your point?” Because if one should give up privileges others don’t have, then we could all start by abandoning our comfortable Western lifestyles.  It’s not a substitute for genuinely fighting oppression.

Except that many domestic workers are oppressed. I’ve worked as a maid, cleaning the houses of the upper-middle class. It’s not a good way to make a living. Some people go out of their way to make you miserable, because they know you need the job and can’t do anything about it. All of them know you’re barely making enough to pay the rent, and they don’t care. On the other hand, my white American privilege meant that I wasn’t enslaved, like a lot of immigrant domestic workers are. My experience was unpleasant enough that I feel automatic revulsion when I hear people say they hire a maid. I know other people that have had positive experiences owning their own cleaning business, so YMMV.

And you know what? I will criticize rich people all fucking day long. I will criticize them for not paying their help a living wage. I will criticize them for not paying their fair share of taxes. I will criticize them for not donating enough to charity. I will criticize them for shitty business practices. And I will do this even though I don’t live in a cardboard box under a bridge. In fact, I will criticize rich people while having a TV.

I’m with Entomologista.  In a thread asking “what’s your least favorite chore,” responding with a list of all the chores you don’t have to do comes off as kind of obnoxious.  I’m probably overly sensitive on this topic because my ADHD makes it very, very hard for me to keep up with chores.  Just reading this thread makes me a little anxious, especially because the end of the year has me always has me on the “next year is the year I finally get my shit together” mental hamster wheel.  For a variety of reasons—multiple jobs or responsibilities, disability—many people, even the privileged, can neither keep up with chores nor pay someone else to do it for them, so someone blithely announcing they don’t even know how the chores get done is bound to strike some nerves.

I love doing housework. It’s relaxing. If I have a frustrating day, nothing like blitzing through a pile of dishes to vent. When I’m done: voilà, clean dishes, and I’ve forgotten what upset me.