We’re having a HOUSE MEETING tonight, so I’ve been told, to go over the House Rules and Cleaning Rota and so forth. Dum dum duuuuuuuuuuummmmmmmm. The words are capitalised because they are so important.
Seriously? It’s like we’re 18 and just out of home for the first time. House Rules???
I’m the youngest, at 24, and the other two are a couple of years older than me. We’ve all been to uni and have lived by ourselves for a good few years. We don’t need this. Actually, the guy that has semi-organised this tonight moved back in with his parents after uni, so maybe hasn’t lived by himself for a few years.
It’s really not hard to keep a place tidy-ish. Take last night, for example. I was in the mood for a spot of cleaning after we (the girlfriend was round) had eaten, and it’d been irritating me that the kitchen had been a mess for the best part of a 3 or 4 days, so I washed everything up and cleaned the place. Took me 20 minutes, max.
And yesterday morning I cleaned the bathroom because that was similarly irritating me with its general level of messiness. A quick scrub here, a wipe there and it was done, without any major fuss.
That’s all that is needed. You don’t need a rota or anything like that. Just notice when something is messy and clean it. With regards to fairness and everyone mucking in, it’s obvious if one person is doing all of it, or isn’t doing anything. Then you just point it out, and the problem resolves itself.
He also wants to create a little communal money jar for staples like milk, bread, washing-up liquid and so forth. Again, I don’t see the point. If you know that we’re short of something, buy it. These things tend to average out over time.
I have bigger things to worry about than whether I’ve bought more than my share of milk this month, at 40p a go. It’s not even an issue.
So this is the mindset I’ll be approaching this evening with. I’m really not a fan of setting everything in stone, when it’s simply not worth it.