The Chore Rankings

A home is where the heart is. It's also where crumbs drop, fester, and eventually attract creatures to feast upon it. There are piles of dust. Clothes pile up. Dishes stack. A home—an apartment, a room, a house, whatever—requires attention.

Rob, as you probably know, is beginning to grasp what it means to turn that kind of attention to a much bigger space than he's already known. There are going to be losing battles. You cannot keep an entire house clean. Instead, it's about shuffling priorities, dividing labor between partners, and realizing some stuff stays dirty.

So, sure, home is where the heart is. It's also where the dirt is.

Dirt is love?

Rob: Division of household labor has always been kind of fraught around my house. I was raised to do a lot of chores: clean the kitchen and bathrooms, wash the cars, vacuum the house, mow the lawn, do laundry, occasionally dust (I did it less than I was supposed to because I hated it so much). Somewhere in there I also became someone who was, if not a neat freak, sensitive to when things got a little too messy. At some point a threshold will be crossed and I immediately need to start cleaning up whatever problem I’ve spotted. MK, on the other hand, is oblivious to mess. It’s not that she can’t appreciate a clean house versus a cluttered and messy one, it’s just that if she’s got her mind elsewhere (and she usually does) then her surroundings don’t really register.

There’s the added fact that MK has some physical constraints around dysautonomia that make it tough for her to spend a lot of time on her feet. Basically the stuff that everyone’s nervous system is supposed to do automatically to even-out bloodflow in different postures and at different activity levels? Hers doesn’t do that real well, and will occasionally try and cause her to black out like a pilot pulling 7Gs because she stood up too fast. That means we have to be real selective about what is worth her limited time on her feet. Taking the dogs out? Not too hard now that we live in a house where she can just walk outside and not wait for an elevator. Dishes? That’s a lot of standing in front of a sink or next to a dishwasher. She can do it but it’s rarely worth it.

So we’ve always had to think about what is the extra stuff I take on around the house, and then what we have to offload somehow. Even before MK’s health issues cropped up, cleaners were a necessity for maintaining a baseline level of cleanliness around the house without us having to negotiate or nag at each other.

However, the new house poses new challenges. Our yard requires a lot of work if we’re going to keep it looking as nice as it has under the previous owners. There’s about thirty years of previous landscaping and horticulture here that has created a pretty idyllic yard but we’ve lived in city apartments our entire adult lives. I never liked yard work when I lived with my parents and, more importantly, I have no idea what I’m doing with flowers or decorative pushes and trees. Plus, the new house is much bigger than the old condo, and cleaners’ prices understandably scale with the size of the home. Having someone come clean our condo was a small luxury, not much more than splurging on delivery sushi for a night. Having cleaners fully service the new place would suddenly be like having a new car payment.

So we’re each going to have to do more, and that’s got me thinking about what are the chores that are easiest for me to do, and which are the ones I actually like the most. What are the household task power rankings?

I can tell you right at the start that cleaning the kitchen is S-tier. It’s something I’m good at, it can be really meditative if you’re giving it a full deep clean where all the appliances are getting unplugged, cleaned, and moved aside so the counters can receive a good scrub. It’s also maybe the most podcast-friendly task there is, so it’s easy to have fun paying attention to something else while I’m doing wax-on, wax-off stuff.

Garbage tier task? Weeding. This is more a personal thing for me, but there’s two issues. One, it’s all low to the ground and I’m tall, so it’s just physically uncomfortable and miserable. Two, I never know what’s  the good-enough version of weeding a lawn or a garden. Do you pull out every plant that’s not supposed to be there? That’s a huge amount of work and might not even be appropriate for the health of the yard. But if you take too lax an approach, you might discover that the innocuous sprouts you ignored have turned into nutrient-sucking vampires who have metastasized into a lawn cancer around all the plants you actually care about. It feels like there’s a learning curve to it, but I hate the basic task so much I don’t want to invest the time into figuring out what is the stuff I have to do, should probably do, and can safely ignore.

What are your S and trash tier chores? You have any tasks you feel will “build character” if you make your kids do them?

Patrick: Hah, my wife is the opposite. I have to specifically mark boxes around the house that I do not want thrown out yet, because it’s something I’ve ordered and I’m not sure we want to keep it. (The most recent example was an alarm clock for my nine-year-old that was a little wonky. I wanted to keep the box for a week, see if the device was what we wanted. I told her this. She still threw the box out a day later.)

Chores in our house are interesting because they’re divided by proximity. I work from home every day of the week, while my wife spends at least a few days in downtown Chicago. It means, generally speaking, I’m the point of contact for everything related to the kids (i.e. sickness, activities) and much of the day-to-day household upkeep falls in my lap because I can fit them in-between things during work.