Picking up picking up picking up after DH

[Anonymous]

Just a vent, since I love him and wouldn't change him. I am just so tired of how he leaves everything around and never puts things away.

Feeding the dog, making coffee, tags from his drycleaning, he scatters detritis wherever he goes. He just doesn't notice. He has moved on. Nagging doesn't help because it's not intentional. He has always had someone to clean up after him too, housekeepers or housekeeping.

I am grateful that he is not a secret chicken stock maker space heater user, so there's that.

It just reinforces me to try to be neater than ever and teach the kids to put things away too.

[Anonymous]

I come home every day and find my husband's socks touching the outside of the hamper. Strength.

[Anonymous]

This is what happens when you always have someone cleaning up after you.

[Anonymous]

Can you get more frequent housekeepers?

Have you tried just not cleaning up after him?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I come home every day and find my husband's socks touching the outside of the hamper. Strength.

OP here. LOL so...close! Thank you for commiserating.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I come home every day and find my husband's socks touching the outside of the hamper. Strength.

OP here. LOL so...close! Thank you for commiserating.

DH leaves ONE sock on the couch. The other one on his bathroom floor. He usually walks around all evening wearing one sock. WTF? I only buy one style of sock for him now and I don't match his socks when I do laundry either.

He leaves his stir stick next to the coffee pot. He leaves a freaking cheese slice wrapper on the counter, above where the trash can pulls out. He leaves cabinet doors open. Drives me up the wall. If I had to share a bathroom with him, I would kill him. Almost 15 years, we've never shared a bathroom.

[Anonymous]

Mine leaves beer bottle caps on the counter above the drawer where the opener is. When he is done with his beer, he places the bottle on the counter above the cabinet where the recycling bin is.

But, he's a good man/husband/dad and I would rather spend my time picking these things up than nagging at him. I'm sure I have a fair amount of irritating habits as well, such as collecting water glasses in the bedroom and putting non-recyclables in the recycling along with his beer bottles.

[Anonymous]

It's nice to know I am not alone. Why is the cereal box left out every morning? Next to the cabinet where it should be living? Any time I ask the response is "I was just about to put that away!"

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I come home every day and find my husband's socks touching the outside of the hamper. Strength.

OP here. LOL so...close! Thank you for commiserating.

DH leaves ONE sock on the couch. The other one on his bathroom floor. He usually walks around all evening wearing one sock. WTF? I only buy one style of sock for him now and I don't match his socks when I do laundry either.

He leaves his stir stick next to the coffee pot. He leaves a freaking cheese slice wrapper on the counter, above where the trash can pulls out. He leaves cabinet doors open. Drives me up the wall. If I had to share a bathroom with him, I would kill him. Almost 15 years, we've never shared a bathroom.

Why do you do his laundry if you're picking up after him for all these other things? Do yours and the kids and leave his alone.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I come home every day and find my husband's socks touching the outside of the hamper. Strength.

OP here. LOL so...close! Thank you for commiserating.

DH leaves ONE sock on the couch. The other one on his bathroom floor. He usually walks around all evening wearing one sock. WTF? I only buy one style of sock for him now and I don't match his socks when I do laundry either.

He leaves his stir stick next to the coffee pot. He leaves a freaking cheese slice wrapper on the counter, above where the trash can pulls out. He leaves cabinet doors open. Drives me up the wall. If I had to share a bathroom with him, I would kill him. Almost 15 years, we've never shared a bathroom.

+1 I would not share a bathroom with him on a daily basis.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Mine leaves beer bottle caps on the counter above the drawer where the opener is. When he is done with his beer, he places the bottle on the counter above the cabinet where the recycling bin is.

But, he's a good man/husband/dad and I would rather spend my time picking these things up than nagging at him. I'm sure I have a fair amount of irritating habits as well, such as collecting water glasses in the bedroom and putting non-recyclables in the recycling along with his beer bottles.

OMG! That's exactly what DH does too! He will think I wrote that, ha

[Anonymous]

Wait! What's a secret chicken stock maker space heater user!? I ask because DH almost lit up the laundry room last week after leaving a space heater on in there to...wait for it...keep his latest vat of (in progress) home-brewed beer warm. It's also wrapped in his winter coat right now, dead serious.

[Anonymous]

Finishes the last of the cereal and leaves the empty box on the counter...about a foot from the recycling bin. Same with the milk jugs. Beer bottle caps everywhere. Jacket thrown on the dining room table, about two feet from the closet and its handy hooks.

I thought I was the only one who dealt with this!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Wait! What's a secret chicken stock maker space heater user!? I ask because DH almost lit up the laundry room last week after leaving a space heater on in there to...wait for it...keep his latest vat of (in progress) home-brewed beer warm. It's also wrapped in his winter coat right now, dead serious.

Can't find the thread right now, but a poster was complaining about how her DH deboned some chicken and started making some stock but then went off to do something else leaving the stock pot going and a space heater on.

DH is like the OP's and others' and for a long time it drove me nuts. I reached the point where there was just this simmering kettle of rage that was eating away at my enjoyment of life and marriage. After spending some time venting to a friend, I realized that I could keep getting annoyed about it or I could do something.

DH had offered to get a housekeeper, but I just couldn't see spending the money on that and the prospect of someone else cleaning my house just bothers me. So that wasn't the answer.

So, first I watched and tried to figure out ways to get him to do the things I wanted. The dry cleaning tags are a good example. They are pernicious, but I realized that DH didn't have a trash can where he gets dressed. So he ripped them off when he got dressed, put them down and forgot about them (until they reached critical mass and they got his attention). So, I put a trashcan next to his closet. Problem mostly solved.

But I still felt like I was constantly picking up after him.

I stopped picking up a lot of the stuff, and I realized that some of it was going away, just not on my timescale. DH left something and moved on, but frequently noticed it the next time he came through. Part of the problem was that I was constantly on the lookout for the things DH would leave behind, and as soon as it was clear that he had left something, I would pounce on it. When I relaxed a little, I found that some (but still definitely not all) of the things he left behind got cleaned up, just on a different schedule than I would have.

When I was watching him, though, I also realized that he was cleaning up after me. Things that I nagged him about, I realized that I did, too - although not nearly as often. But he was cleaning up and putting those things away in the same way he did the things that he left behind. I also realized that when he was taking the initiative to clean something up I told him that I was planning to get to it later and that he didn't need to do it. So, I was sending very conflicting messages to him - I was nagging him for things I did, too, and I was stopping him when he was trying to help.

So I took several steps - I tried to be more consistent about not doing the things I was nagging him about, I tried to relax and recognize that some things were going to happen on a different schedule, I worked noticing when he did things on the time frame I wanted them done and on complimenting him for them, and I stopped stopping him when he was trying to help - except, of course, when his "help" was going to actually make more work for me, which still happens on occasion. I also worked on reminding myself about the things he did for me/us, because DH does do a lot of the things around the house that I do like to, and sometimes I have to remind myself about that. A lot of my anger/annoyance went away after that.

Phase 3 involved positive reinforcement - for both of us. Our sex life wasn't what I wanted it to be and was nowhere close to what DH wanted it to be. So, when DH did things to keep the house cleaner on a schedule that kept me from feeling like all of the burden was on me, I used those happy feelings to get a little frisky with DH. This wasn't just me giving him sex to reward him, it was me rewarding him but also changing my own behavior in ways that I wanted to change it - so win-win.

[Anonymous]

Men are pigs