Dish scrubber +1

One of the things that came from the aforementioned house meetings is the use of a site called Chore Wars. Chores are a common cause of arguments in households larger than 1 person so Chore Wars is a way to make doing chores more rewarding.

You start off by making a character with a certain class (really only the character's name matters as the class changes when leveling up) for each person in the house. Then one of you creates a party and invites the other members of the house into that party. Everytime one of you does a chore, you claim an adventure associated with that chore. The default adventure list has things like paying bills, grocery shopping, cleaning dishes, etc. You can add, remove, or edit adventures at your leisure.

Everytime you claim an adventure, you get an amount of experience defined by the adventure (hopefully these amounts are proportional to the task, so taking the garbage out gets less experience than doing the dishes). You also have a chance of getting items, gold, or fighting monsters on your adventure (all of these are defined as possibilities in the adventure). We have an adventure for cleaning the stove top and one of the potential monsters to fight is a Crusted Cheese Goo.

The enemy fights serve no purpose other than to keep the RPG feel the site has going. The items and gold are used based on what the house agrees to. My house hasn't decided anything, so I just keep stockpiling gold and alley cat hair. Some possibilities are to "spend" some gold so you don't have to do a particular chore one week.

What I find useful about this (and really the only reason I do it anymore) is it's a good way to track who overall is not doing their share of the chores. In theory, everyone should be getting about the same experience per week and so if someone is a lower level character (you level up after reaching certain amounts of experience, which adds stats based on the chores you did and changes your class to match your stats) then you know they are slacking. You can also track who did a particular chore for the past six months, so you can tell if one chore tends to be done by one person or the whole group more often.

If you live with other people and haven't settled on a way to deal with chore distribution, I would highly recommend Chore Wars. Especially if you also happen to like fantasy RPG settings.