:~D You gals are hilarious! My husband gave in, so last year we moved from a condo (no plant-pots allowed outdoors! only landscaper could dig dirt!) to a house with a small garden & now he has to mow the grass.

Boy, I guess there are multiple levels of issues we can all face. One is just division of labor and how spouses feel about that--so, DW may be expected to do all the house cleaning and DH may do car upkeep, bills, home repairs--substitute any similar examples. Are they each happy with the division? If not, is it because of the job--drudgery, or whatever--or time commitment ("I spend 4 hrs a day on chores and you spend 30 min). All that can be tricky to divide up and still never may be 50-50. Then there would be more of the "slob" issues in which one person creates a large burden that seems unnecessary or inconsiderate. We think of cleaning most often, but a different example is if someone abuses the car, or an appliance, or stop up the toilet (especially if repeatedly and not just a simple mistake) and then the other person has to pick up the pieces, perhaps with a large time commitment or $$ commitment. As in the example of the really messy cook (I mean, if REALLY messy)--then the cleaning spouse could have a job that can't be done with a reasonable amount of time and energy--and at night you can't just hire someone to come fix it. Control is a factor for me--I am less likely to complain if I have to clear up someone's clutter, as long as I can do what I want with it. It becomes a major problem if I can't move it, can't sort it, can't organize it, but have to watch the dirt accumulate on top of it or can't use the dinner table, or chair. If it just turns out that picking up is one of my jobs in the division of labor scheme, I can often do that, and then I decide if I also have time to cook dinner, or whatever.

For regular household chores, things in our house sort of just get done when they need to get done. We both have things that we tend to do -- he waters the garden, scoops the cat box, takes out the trash, and usually loads the dishwasher, whereas I do more of the general tidying of each room (he's better if he's given a specific task; if I told him to "clean the living room", he'd have no clue). Usually every week or two we jointly clean the entire house, which involves mopping floors, scrubbing toilets, and all that stuff -- realistically, I do the lions share of that work, but he tries his best. One thing that has made housework a little more fun for us is this thing called Chore Wars -- if your husband (or kids) is into D&D or other roleplaying games, it's a way to track your chores, and gain "experience" while doing it. My husband and I compete to gain more points than the other, and right now he's beating me :( Because my husband is such a geek, though, he's been so willing to do chores lately, just to be able to enter them into this Chore Wars thing, so I love it. As far as household maintenance type stuff, like fixing things, generally hubbie asks me what our plans are for the weekend. I tell him if I think we need to work on anything special, and if he's noticed anything that needs attention, he'll add it in. We also keep a list up on the fridge of things that need to be done, and try to knock off 1 or 2 of those regularly. I'm very lucky that my husband is always very willing to pitch in and do his fair share -- I try to return the favor by making sure that he has plenty of his own time on the weekend to do what he wants (play video games, watch TV, whatever).

Thank you! I love Palladian blue! But it now turns out my neighbor has "Interesting Aqua" on her walls, and I love it! So going for that! Nice that it's SW b/c that's where my painter buys his paint (although thanks for noting SW could do a BM shade).