The top five worst chores, according to a stress cleaner
It is quite often that procrastination on doing college work leads me to doing everything when the work that is due the next day or week. One bad habit I picked up as a kid was stress cleaning. Even though I dislike chores, I will still do them. Here are the top five worst chores, according to me, a stress cleaner.
Dishes without a dishwasher tend to build up faster than anything else, especially if you live with multiple people. In a house where five people could accumulate three, maybe four, sink loads of dishes in a day, it was by far the worst chore. All the grime builds up and hardens if you leave things on the dishes like my brother usually did. His favorite was chili, and man did that take elbow grease to get out. On top of that, I typically ended up doing the dishes because I was the only child who could do them “correctly.” My brothers were fond of using weaponized incompetence to get out of this chore.
Cleaning the bathroom was gross. There were five of us in the house, three of whom were boys who could not aim or clean up their beard hair; they also did not know how to use the shower curtain to make sure water didn’t get all over the floor. Plus, with all of them being on the taller side, they managed to make reaching the shower head relatively difficult as I am much shorter in comparison. Thankfully, this was a chore mostly reserved for them, as my mom and I tended to share our own bathroom.
Sweeping/mopping was pure manual labor. Unless I did it at night when everyone was asleep, that floor would almost immediately be covered in boot prints from my dad and brothers, who all worked jobs in contracting. It seemed as if they loved to step on the freshly clean floor, whether they were getting food or going to the bathroom before they left for work. It was annoying—the labor of cleaning the mop, wringing the mop, and then storing it was a whole ten-step process.
Laundry is next on the list—especially in college. This chore is a hassle because of the many steps like sorting the laundry, putting the laundry in the washer, and setting the timer. When that goes off, move the clothes to the dryer, set another timer, and then hope to God some impatient person doesn’t touch your clean clothes so that they can use your dryer because they could not wait the one minute your dryer had left. Sort your clothes again, and then finally fold and hang them up. It has gotten to the point where I know if I take unhung, unsorted clothes back to my room, they will sit in that basket until I find the time to procrastinate enough to want to put them away.
Making the bed makes this list because of the way my mom and dad wanted it done, especially when guests came over. Now, even today, I do not make my bed unless I have guests coming over. The explanation of why we had to make our beds as kids was one that I didn’t understand until I got my own dorm room. My mom explained that rooms need to be clean, and clean included beds being made as if our guests’ first place to go upon arriving in our house was to inspect the children’s room and proceed to judge the unmade beds. It never quite made sense to me, and even today, it still doesn’t.
I know people have different opinions on the worst chores, but I hope we can all agree that dishes no doubt make it on the top five worst.