I have most of this day off, just working an evening shift from 5-9:30. This means I have a nice, uninterrupted span of time in which I should be getting lots of housework done. And yet, it's 10:45 and so far my only accomplishment is taking a shower. A good accomplishment, to be sure, but my day hasn't been booming with productivity.
The main thing I need to do is laundry. This is good: I love laundry. It's my favorite chore. I love sorting things into piles, which is the first step of laundry. Without kids and with a husband who has an "indoor" job, most of our laundry isn't that dirty or smelly, so nothing to bother me in the washing step. I love everything about the dryer phase, especially how everything comes out in a big warm Bounce-smelling pile. I like to sit on the couch and sort and fold while I watch TV. I love laundry.
But.
The trouble with laundry is that it leads to two of my least favorite activities: ironing and putting things away. I don't mind ironing in theory, but my ironing board is a drop down from my bathroom door, so I have to stand in the bathroom to do this chore. Also pretty much the only clothes I get to iron are Ben's long-sleeved button down shirts, aka the least fun things to iron. After 5 years of it I'm still not entirely sure how I'm supposed to iron the sleeves. Mostly I just try to avoid this step and sometimes that means Ben looks a little wrinkly. Good thing he works in the music business where that is encouraged. So ironing, not that fun.
The least fun part of laundry, however, is that after all the fun of washing and drying and folding, I'm supposed to get up and put all these clothes away. I might not dislike this step as much if we had more closet and dresser space. But since we're tight on both those things, I dread the process of finding hangers, hanging things up, trying to shove the hanger onto the already jam-packed rack in a way that doesn't knock anything else off, and so on. Same goes for folded clothes in drawers. I'm not sure how, but no matter how much laundry I do, when I go to put it away, the drawers are already full. This has led me to the very bad habit of just sitting the piles of clean clothes on top of my dresser, or more accurately, on top of other piles of clean clothes on top of my dresser. Hang-up clothes get draped in a hopefully non-wrinkling way over a pile of other hang-up clothes over the suitcase I haven't fully unpacked from New Zealand. Okay, now I've revealed too much.
What are your favorite and least favorite chores?
3 comments:
I like to clean the kitchen. It feels productive, since you obviously want the place where you make your food to be really clean. Also, cooking - but does that count as a chore?
And I HATE H-A-T-E to vacuum! I don't know why, exactly - it just takes so much time, and when little pieces of lint don't pick up off the rug, I feel like I will scream!
1. Taking out the trash. A scary number of times I just bag it up and put it in my laundry room and shut the door. When there's a scary accumulation of trash bags (3 or 4 or at least 1 smelly one) I take it out. Granted, I do have to hike to the dumpster, but on the other hand, it's like 50 yards - not that far.
2. Dishes. Thank you Sweet Jesus for the dishwasher.
3. Folding clothes and putting them away. Yuck. Washing and drying? Check. Done. Easy. Taking them out of the dryer and NOT leaving them in a heap? Yuck.
I so agree - I HATE putting clothes away! Even after we clean everything out and take a heaping mound to Goodwill, I still can't seem to fit everything in the drawers. But my absolute least favorite chore...floors. I hate sweeping, I hate mopping, and I especially hate scrubbing. And the shiny end results seems to last all of about 2 minutes!
I find a strange joy in cleaning the bathrooms, though. I like the end product. Except of course, the floors.
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