Household Chores

This week we are going to talk about something I hate. I don’t like to use the word “hate” because it’s very negative. In fact, you could say that I hate to use the word “hate”.

There are lots of synonyms for hate – lots of other words that mean the same thing. You have despise, detest, loathe, disdain and abhor. I don’t know if you agree, but I think that all of these words sound hateful and negative.

Anyway, back to today’s topic. I bet you all want to know what it is that I hate. Well, I hate chores. Chores are tasks that you have to do – they are not fun things, but essential things. I particularly hate household chores, or housework.

Housework is all the little jobs that you need to do in your house such as cleaning and tidying. I find these tasks to be very boring and time consuming. They take up too much time when I could be doing more important things like watching TV or looking at social media.

Let’s look at some of the things I have to do regularly. Well, obviously there is the washing. I have to wash my clothes in the washing machine with washing powder or detergent. This doesn’t really require much effort. I really just need to load the machine (that means to put the clothes in the machine) and add the detergent and then press the button. However, the part that I hate (there is that word again), the part that I hate is when the clothes have been cleaned and I need to take them out of the washing machine and put them away in the wardrobe or closet or into drawers. It seems to take me hours….well, a few minutes anyway.

Another task that I have to do often is to iron my clothes. This is when you use a hot iron to smooth out the clothes and remove any wrinkles or creases. This is the thing I hate the most. It is so boring and actually quite difficult. Nowadays, I work from home, so I don’t need to iron my clothes so much, but when I worked in an office I used to have to iron all the time!

One task that I quite like is doing the dishes. Some people say “doing the washing up”. Doing the washing up or doing the dishes is when you clean the plates, cups, pots and pans that you have used for cooking and eating. I don’t mind this. It’s not too bad, because I can listen to the radio or some music while I do it and it doesn’t take very long. 

Vacuuming or hoovering is another chore that people have to do regularly. Here, in the UK, we usually use “to hoover” as a verb, in other parts of the world they use the verb “to vacuum”. It’s quite interesting, because the verb “to hoover” has come from the name of a company that makes vacuum cleaners. The company name was Hoover and it  was so popular in the UK that the machines are all known as hoovers (even if they are made by another company) and the verb became “to hoover”. I used to hate this job, but about a year ago I bought a little robot to do my hoovering (or vacuuming). Now I just press a button on my smart phone and my roomba robot travels round my house hoovering the carpet. I love it.

Sometimes, I also have to mop the floor. In most of my house I have carpets, which my robot can hoover, but in my kitchen and bathroom I have hard floors and they need to be mopped from time to time. I don’t like doing this because I always manage to step on a wet part of the floor and make it dirty again. Because of this it takes me a long time to do. 

A few times a week I have to dust my house. This is when you remove the dust that has landed on the furniture in your house. My house seems to be very dusty and sometimes I think the dust comes back within a few minutes. 

Now and then I also have to wash the windows. The only problem with this is that everyone on the street can see me when I do it. So I need to get dressed up and wear nice clothes. I only clean the inside of the windows because there is a window cleaner who comes once a month and cleans the outside part.

The good news is that I have already done all my chores for today – so I don’t need to worry. What are your favourite and least favourite chores? Get in touch and let me know!