As I'm sure you may have noticed, I have a kitchen obsession.
Now, I don't mean the obsession with food/cooking, although I have that too and I know you've also noticed that. No, what I mean is that I have this obsession with starting with a clean kitchen and finishing with a clean kitchen. You can imagine that this causes a few problems.
I don't live with clean people. I think that at my age, hoping to live with cleanly people is asking a little too much. College students are not clean. Amber and Ian are not too bad, they clean up after themselves for the most part. Amber loves doing laundry, which results in me never having to do any. If Amber is washing dishes, she will wash mine as well if there happen to be any.
The problem is that I cannot do anything in the kitchen unless the sink is completely empty and the counter is completely clean. I use the kitchen upwards of 2 times a day, between my morning coffee, dinner, sometimes lunch and sometimes other random things. Amber sometimes tells me, don't worry, I will clean the kitchen. So I go sit in the living room to wait and use the kitchen when she is finished, but then she gets distracted and wanders off to do something else. So I wait, and wait, and wait, and eventually I just go wash the dishes and clean the kitchen myself.
She never says anything about it, but Ian does. It has only happened twice now, but sometimes he finishes with his cooking, throws everything in the sink and goes in the living room to eat his dinner at his desk. Then when I go in to cook, I wash all of his dishes because I need space. Both times, he has yelled at me for it. The first time he only told me, "I was going to do that, you didn't have to." Today, he said, "What the hell is wrong with you? Why do you keep washing my dishes?"
I try. I try to leave the dirty dishes in the sink, and the messiness on the counter, I really do. I start pulling out my things to chop and cook and try to utilize the smallest amount of space, but somehow always end up with a sponge, wiping the counters and washing the dishes. The counters are another story and probably a harder thing to get them to take care of. Ian makes protein drinks all day long, and when he pulls down his enormous tubs of protein powder he spills some on the counter and just leaves it there. If they drip things on the counter while they are cooking, etc., they leave it there. To me it seems simple: if you spill something, clean it up. Cleaning things up when I spill has become habit for me though, and I don't have the energy to get on their cases every time they spill something and leave it.
But the dishes. Eventually they will learn. They will learn that if they don't want me cleaning up after them, they need to clean up quicker. They can be lazy all they want, I don't mind washing their dishes. They do so much for me. But if it bothers them, they'll have to learn to be lazy only in the areas that don't affect other people.
And when I say that they do so much for me, it goes beyond the cleaning. I think Ian is accustomed to buying all the things for the apartment himself. Of course, I'm not really used to that, or comfortable with it. Ian drinks boxed milk that doesn't have to be refrigerated (which I find distasteful), but Amber and I drink refrigerated milk, which Ian buys. I can't buy milk separately because there is no space in the fridge for that. We also share sugar, and any time I need something that I happen to not have, Amber readily offers it up to me from their supplies. I know for a fact that Ian does all the grocery shopping between the two of them, Amber spends no money on groceries (they eat out a lot though, and she spends money on that). He also buys all the dish soap, laundry soap, toilet paper, etc. I offer to contribute for these things, and he appears to not hear me (though I think that is selective hearing). If we happen to be out of milk or sugar, I will go out and buy some and no one seems to mind that, but Ian makes it to the store more often than I do so it doesn't make much of a dent in anything.
So, yeah. For now, I am going to continue washing their dishes because it doesn't bother me a bit to do so, and they are going to continue to not like that until the figure out that I'm not going to stop doing it just because they tell me to, and an easy way to solve the problem is to get to it before I do. Simple stuff. :)
