Housework kind of blows.

That being said, it’s gotta get done or else your place will devolve into anarchy and chaos. Especially with kids in the picture.

Recently, my family was over for lunch at our friends’ house. Our friends have a super cute eight-month-old baby girl. They also had just moved into their new (enormous!) house, and were trying to strike a balance for how to do chores. So they asked my wife and I how we split up the housework, because they’ve seen our place—it’s never completely clean, but it’s usually reasonably tidy. And most importantly (and of great interest to our friends), my wife and I rarely argue about the chores.

I had to think about their question for a second. I realized that we did have a reasonable system to handle the chores, we just never really set it out in stone. Until now that is!

I thought I would write a post on how Yuri and I split up our chores since I think we have a pretty good, workable system.
So, here’s the Kim Household System for Handling Housework™!

In this system, I am going to make a few assumptions:

1. You are a lower- to upper-middle class family. Wealthy people don’t count because they can just hire help for 100% of housework.

2. You can afford a cleaner to come in at least a once-a-month.

3. You have kids.

The following copyrighted, trademark-registered, patent-pending system will allow you and your family to live in harmony when it comes to that most fraught subject that married couples run into on the regular: doing house chores.

Once you got this nailed down, then you just need to sort out the other thing that couples fight about to achieve marital bliss: Money! (I’ll try to tackle that in a future blog post).

The Kim Household System for Handling Housework™® (Patent Pending)

This time-tested system consists of 7 simple things.

First thing: Compile a coarse list of what needs to get done around the house. The coarser the better.

You want your list to be more “macro” and not “micro”. Here’s some examples:

•  Washing dishes
•  Making breakfast
•  Preparing lunch for work
•  Cooking dinner
•  Laundry washing/drying
•  Laundry folding
•  Picking up stuff
•  Swamping out the bathroom
•  Groceries
•  Yard work
•  Putting the kids to bed
•  Taking the 2.5 kids to 2.5 activities per week.

Second thing: Figure out what each one of you HATES to do, and what each one doesn’t mind doing.

Now here’s the important part that contributes to marital harmony: On a scale of 1 to 10, have each of you grade how much you HATE doing any one of these chores in your list.

You might not hate a particular chore at all: mark that chore as a ‘1’.

You might fricking HATE doing another chore: give that one a ‘10’.

In my household, I actually don’t mind doing the dishes. There’s something soothing about doing the dishes that I enjoy. I like the feeling at the end when I have a pile of clean dishes and a tidy kitchen. On the other hand, my wife totally hates doing the dishes, so it’s lucky that she married a guy like me!

My wife actually likes to fold and put away laundry, something I’ve always despised doing myself. When I was single, I wouldn’t even bother taking my clothes out of the dryer—I’d just rummage around the dryer drum every time I needed a clean pair of socks or whatever.

Now the reason why this is a Hate Scale of 1 to 10 is because no one actually LOVES to do chores. That’s why they are called chores. If it was a Love Scale then each task would get ‘1’s and ‘2’s, right?

Third thing: Assign each chore to the one who hates it least.

Take a look at your Hate Scale Scores for each task, and whoever scores lower for each task does that task.

If they are about the same, say, within two points, leave that for the next step.

So, in our household, Yuri hates to do the dishes and hates to go downstairs to do the laundry. I’d rather not fold laundry and can’t stand doing the vacuuming. So these are pretty much no-brainer task assignments.

Fourth thing: All remaining tasks assign based on approximately balancing out the workload.

There will be a number of tasks where both of you either like doing or dislike doing in roughly equal amounts. Figure out which of these tasks need to be allocated so that you both have approximately the same workload.

Some tasks can be switched back and forth depending on the day. For example, cooking dinner is about an 80%-20% split between my wife and I. We sort of play it by ear who makes dinner on any given day.

Key thing: you’re going for an approximate balancing of the workload. Striving for complete equality in workload at all times will never work–that’s a sure fire way to get into tons of fights with your significant other. Just go for “approximate”, and that’s good enough.

Fifth thing: Exchanging chores is acceptable, and even desirable.

Every now and then, it is completely fine to help each other out on your assigned chores. Helping each other out really makes both of you feel like you are a part of a team. And it also means that you both aren’t always on each other’s case about how much your assigned task sucks.

Sometimes this can be taken to extremes. My wife just twisted her ankle and can’t really walk, so I’m doing 100% of the chores right now. A couple of months ago, I was studying for a professional exam, so my wife took on the bulk of the chores.

Sixth thing: Get a housekeeper to reset your household at least once a month (also keeps you both mentally sane).

Try Googling “My housekeeper saved my marriage”. It’s hilarious when you read the odes by various bloggers to their hired help in keeping their marriage stable and sane.

IT’S TRUE. A housekeeper really makes a huge difference, even with infrequent visits. We have our own housekeeper come in only once a month to scrub out the bathroom, clean the floors, and straighten out our messes. Even though it is only once a month, she makes a huge difference in the liveability of our house, and in my family’s collective sanity.

Seventh thing: Accept that your house is simply not going to be perfectly clean all the time.

Finally, and most importantly, allow your house to get a little messy.

It’s a mindset thing. Get away from the idea that your house needs to be TV show-ready 100% of the time.

The simple fact is that with kids in the mix, your house will regularly devolve into messy chaos. Accept that you can only manage and minimize the chaos, but you can never eliminate it. This is the bargain that you made with Nature. You are blessed with the joy of having children who will assure your own genetic immortality. In return, you have to deal with an increase in entropy in your life. It’s a good bargain, believe me!

What you are striving for is controlled chaos, rather than order. Sorry dude: full-blown order is a little too much to ask for!

This can be a tough thing to swallow for many neat freaks (like Yours Truly), but it can really save your sanity. Just do it. A little mess never hurt anyone.

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So, there you have it: Seven Steps that you can follow to handle the housework in your family!

The great thing about having older children is that you can eventually draft them into helping out with the chores. I’m nowhere close to that right now, but in the future I fully intend to conscript my kids into doing housework while I sit on my can and drink a beer. One has to have goals in life, right?