Making it Work (so you don’t have to work all weekend)
I love to be home, love to be with my family hanging out in our little house in our pajamas – cooking, watching movies, drawing and writing and reading…..and cleaning the bathroom?
Not so much. In fact, it has come to my attention that the days we have as a family are spent on a litany of chores, inside the house (laundry, dishes, plumbing, painting, cleaning, repairing) and outside (watering, weeding, painting, fencing, planting, pruning). Home ownership is a lot of work, and since we each work two jobs already, it was starting to feel like our entire life was dictated by this house – either working to pay for the house, or working on the house to maintain it. If we were to have any time together at all that did not revolve around repairs and maintenance, we were going to need some help. And, if I am being completely honest here (which apparently I am) I can admit to you with no small amount of embarrassment that I hate doing household chores. Hate it. I would far rather work a shift at the cafe then weed the yard or clean the shower. And because I hate doing the chores so much, it takes a while for me to work up the enthusiasm to actually DO them. What’s worse, when I do take the bull by the horns and get started on a project, it always seems to take far longer then it should. So since I would rather work at my job then in the yard, I figured out a way to make that happen.
I am hardly in the position to have “hired help”. That is just not in the budget. I’m a waitress and a freelance writer, for goodness sake! But this week, I put an ad on Craigslist looking for someone to do our yard work – and I couldn’t have been happier to pick up an extra dinner shift at the cafe to pay for it. Which is how it came to pass that while I ran errands on Monday morning, a lovely woman (with a horticulture degree!) came over and worked on the yard. I returned home to a neatly weeded lawn and pruned shrubs, just in time to get the kids in the car and head off to exercise the dogs. I was grinning from ear to ear as I counted out my hard-earned tips from the night before, and handed them over. I didn’t have to weed the yard ! YAHOO ! And the truth is, this woman did a faster, better job then I ever could. I would never have gotten my whole yard weeded in one morning. The kids would have interrupted me countless times. If I had asked them to help, every bulb in the yard would have been dug up, and every weed left to flourish. I already know not to ask my husband to trim the shrubs….the last time he did that, it took six months for the hole to fill back in and the leaves to grow back on the branches.
Of course, it’s not just about the quality of the work…..it was about delegating and finding ways to get things done, so that a little bit of the pressure and responsibility was off my shoulders. Literally. After a long week of work in the service industry, it was really nice to have someone else doing the heavy lifting for a time. And I was nothing but thrilled to pay for her help.
At the end of the day, I felt like I had accomplished 3 times what I might have if I’d tried to do it all myself. Now we can spend our Saturday relaxing at the beach with the kids, and the yard looks great (which relieves a lot of stress and guilt I was feeling about it getting overgrown and messy looking). The woman who did the work will be back next week, to help finish up a patio that has been sitting, incomplete, for years. Literally….years. And that is going to feel AMAZING to cross off our To Do List.
The fact is, lots of people are looking for work these days, and we have a lot of work to be done. So I sat down and figured out how much I could afford to pay someone, put the ad up, and got 5 phone calls within a few hours. One guy was a landscaper who said he would do the job for double what I had offered to pay in my ad, which I politely declined. The other four respondents were out of work, and happy to earn cash at the rate I could afford, for a few hours of pulling weeds.
Up next, someone to help me keep my bathrooms and kitchen sparkling clean – I am almost giddy at the prospect !
Recent Posts By Vanessa Ghantous
- Well, This is Awkward. Job Loss Amongst Friends Part Two - August 18th, 2010
- Love Letters - July 29th, 2010
- Well, This is Awkward: Job Loss Amongst Friends - July 21st, 2010
- Renaissance, Woman. - July 7th, 2010
- But I don't wanna: Road tripping for the masses - June 30th, 2010
My husband & I were feeling the same way you were. We don’t have kids, but work full time and all our free time was taken up with the house. So we came up with a plan:
1. Consolidate errands – Target run only once a month, grocery shopping every other week rather than every
2. Hire a maid – We use Maid Brigade, they actually cost less than I expected a maid to cost and now I don’t have to clean!
3. Hire experts for all other projects – like installing the new toilet that’s been sitting in boxes in our basement for a year+
4. Ignore some things – like our yard, which is more clover than grass and patchy in some places. Since I’m fine with it, why would I spend my free time and hard earned money making it “better”?
I am a much happier woman now that I actually have free time!