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Household size changes who cleans, not how often

Move from a shared house into living alone, or the other way round, and it's tempting to assume the whole cleaning schedule should shrink or grow to match: more people, more cleaning, fewer people, less. Only part of that holds up, and the part that doesn't is worth understanding.

Two separate things get mixed up here: how often a job needs doing, which is a fixed hygiene fact that doesn't care who's doing it, and how much of it lands on each person, which does scale with headcount. A third factor changes some of those frequencies by more than headcount ever does, and it has nothing to do with how many people live in the flat.

What follows sorts out which parts of a cleaning schedule move with household size, which don't, and which only shift with hard water.

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