Least Favorite Household Task
I hate laundry. Always have. One reason is that I have always lived in homes with inconvenient laundry rooms. At my parent’s house it is in the basement, down a very steep flight of concrete steps. In the first apartment my husband and I shared we had to use a portable washer and dryer. Very annoying. In every home we have owned since it has been in the basement.
It isn’t just maneuvering the steps with the heavy baskets that I despise. I hate pre-treating, which with two boys I do a lot of. I hate the sheer amount of it and how it never seems to be done. I hate that it is an interrupted task – start a load, wait an hour, move to dryer, start new load, repeat steps. I hate that it is four steps – wash, dry, fold, put away.
So there it is. Laundry is a task I simply hate doing. I often put it off, which only makes things worse for me.
What is your least favorite household chore?
– Maggie AAR
It’s going to be finish of mine day, except before finish I am reading this fantastic piece of writing to improve my know-how.
Interesting the comments about grocery shopping, maybe there’s more of a cultural difference here then I first thought.
Of course some grocery shopping I do is in a supermarket and sort of follows Victoria’s description. But most of mine is done at small shops or the market, so it’s more like:
Friday afternoon, drive to the small wood oven bakery in the next village, open the door to the miniscule sales room, be hit by the lovely aroma of freshly baked breads and cakes. Talk the baking lady into selling me one of her lovely lemon-cottage cheese cakes, that I once again forgot to pre-order. Select one or two loafs of the yummy bread. Yes, the weekend has finally started! Head to the butchers, discuss the weather, the lovely barbecue meat and fish on offer ….
You see the difference and why I really like doing this.
I love doing my laundry! As others have said, really easy to just pop clothes in the washer and dryer, and then I can get on to doing anything else. Probably my least favorite chore is dusting. Aside from the sneeze-inducing dust (no matter what type of cloth or wipe I use) I just hate having to pick up things on shelves/counters, dust where they were, and then put them back.
I despise cleaning the bathroom. Or, I should say, cleaning the shower. It is an older fiberglass tub/shower unit and it holds onto soap scum like nothing else. It also has these indentations that you have to scrub out with a toothbrush to get clean. Plus, it doesn’t help that because I hate cleaning it so much that I let it get really, really dirty before cleaning it. Also, I kind of resent the fact that, while I am not the only one who uses said bathroom, I am, in fact, the only one who cleans the bathroom. So I can ignore a lot of dirt.
Unfortunately it is really dirty right now, and as company is coming in a week, I have to get to scrubbing. But I have saved a book that I really want to read as incentive. I can only read it after the bathroom is clean.
Leigh- I LOVE your dogdoor idea. I have 2 little dogs and I keep telling them that they need to wipe their paws before they come in the house, but they just don’t listen to me (I wonder why, ha ha). But, with my luck, even if someone could make a dogdoor like that, it would probably scare my dogs ans they wouldn’t use it!
When my mother was a girl, laundry was done in a very old, communal style laundry as most average households did not have their own washer and dryer.
This was always a huge task with clothes boiled in huge copper vessels, wrung through hand rotated wringers and then hung out to dry. My grandmother once slyly asked her what her favourit part of laundry day was, and my mother quickly replied “packing up and going home”.
I never iron, so that isn’t something that takes up any time doing laundry. Shirts and similar stuff are put into the dryer for about 4 minutes, then hung up on a hanger or clothes line to finish drying. I’ve never had any problem with wrinkles. But then I purposely don’t purchase items that require ironing.
I don’t like laundry OR grocery shopping. I am kind of ashamed to admit I don’t like laundry, after all, it’s not like I’m going down to the river and beating them against a flat rock. I have a state of the art washer and dryer, that have functions I haven’t even used yet! And I have a one-story house, so no basement, and a separate laundry room. But like Wendy says, no sooner than one load is starched, ironed, folded and put away, the laundry hampers are full again. Do those things breed overnight? The one thing I do like about laundry is during the spring and summer when I can line dry my sheets. I LOVE the smell of line dried sheets :-)
Now grocery shopping, WHEW! I want to say that I love cooking, always have and probably always will. I like putting ingredients together and coming up with something that is more than the total of its parts. Grocery shopping on the other hand. Really!?
Think about the process for goodness sakes! Drive to the store, remove items from shelves, place items in cart, remove items from cart, place on belt at register, remove items from belt, place in bags, place bags back in cart, remove bags from cart, place in trunk/backseat of car, drive home, remove bags from trunk/backseat of car, place bags in kitchen, remove items from bags, place items in refridgerator, in freezer, on kitchen and or pantry shelves, dispose of, save and recycle grocery bags, or place reusable bags back where they belong. And I haven’t cooked or eaten a thing! As you can tell, I’ve given that grocery shopping thing a LOT of thought :-)
Ironing, without any doubt. Closely followed by cleaning or hoovering.
But I like doing the laundry; least those bits that do not have to be ironed ;-) And buying food and cooking are about the only household chores that are sometines fun.
Laundry is my least favorite, too! We’re a family of 4 and it takes me all day to do the laundry, if not a day and a half. Then by the time I’m done, the hampers are all already half full again. It never ends.
I don’t mind laundry either. Just stick it in machines, and fold articles at the end. Easy peasy.
Cleaning my apartment is probably my least enjoyable household chore but it does feel nice once it is all done.
LOL – Laundry is the only household chore I LIKE. And I like the whole process. Everything else? Not so much. I’d say my least favorite would probably be the part where I have to nag my children to pick up their stuff.
Cleaning house because with now five- yes five dogs no matter what I do, I never have a clean house. I can be mopping the floor, and one dog will come in and wipe out all that I have done. And with that excuse I have just gotten complacent about it so that attitude doesn’t help either. When it never says clean it is easy to get the attitude of why bother.
I spent a half a day Tuesday cleaning and you can’t even tell- Sigh, I should be Oprah with personal dog groomers, and housekeepers or maybe I will invent a dog door that blows air – like the dryers at the automatic car washes. Come in the dog door and all the dirt is blown off. . .
Maggie, we’re at odds here—I love washing clothes. For me, it’s one of the simplest of chores, you get instant clean clothes and can do other things between pushing the buttons on the machines. They’re in my basement, too. Gives me additional exercise up and down the stairs. I don’t fold immediately from the dryer, but stack them one on top of another. Later on, while watching TV, I’ll do the folding and I’m not precise with it.
My least favorite chore, as Lori L said, is grocery shopping—or really any kind of shopping. I absolutely hate it, will postpone it as long as necessary and then make stupid decisions on the spur of the moment because I waited too long. After X number of years, I’m still trying to talk my husband into taking it over (because he doesn’t mind it at all); but he’ll go with me, not without.
Cooking is stacking up to be my third least-loved chore. I’m out of the habit, can still do it, but don’t love it anymore. It’s so much more fun to go out.
This is easy. Grocery shopping! UGH. Not to mention that it is very expensive to eat healthy!