I’m overwhelmed with the very notion of maintaining a household. After a nine hour day and two hours of commuting, I’ve got three hours left in each day to get dressed, get my daughter dressed, feed us both breakfast, feed us both dinner, play games, take baths, read stories, pick up after ourselves, have adventures, and get to bed. And that’s assuming we don’t rest — not even once — from wake up to bed time. Single people without children and dual income families with children can probably relate to this as well. After work, there simply isn’t that much time in the day.
As much as I enjoy cooking, love making extravagant meals and trying new techniques, the time it takes to do so is not worth what I’d have to give up to get it. So this means I either make very quick meals, eat raw foods, find people to share the cooking burden with, or hire the job out and eat at restaurants.
A month or two ago I finally broke down and paid someone to pull my weeds, trim my bushes, lay down landscapers cloth, and put down mulch. I was just tired of the letters from my HOA and they were claiming they were going to pay someone to do it and bill me and I was afraid of what they were going to cost. So now, my flower beds look beautiful.
But my yard still looks terrible. And my HOA has started sending notes about that. My grass is not really grass. It’s mostly weeds — low weeds mind you — with grass in between. As evidenced by the vacant lots in my neighborhood, it’s simply the nature of things around here. Without direct supervision and control, the weeds grow and the grass doesn’t.
So I’m supposed to go buy some “weed and feed” product, lock my kid inside the house because she certainly can’t be around that stuff, and spend a couple of days not enjoying her and, instead, following some intricate and arcane pattern of water then feed then water then rain dance. Then I can’t let my kid outside for at least two or three days as I wait for that stuff to go away. The alternative, as I did with the flowerbeds, is to hire the job out. For $50-70 a month, someone trained to do so will apply a steady stream of life threatening chemicals to my lawn to ensure that it grows green and “Natural”.
I get around to cleaning baseboards and fans every couple of months. Storage closets and such can go a whole year without being rearranged. I get to the toilets and bathroom counters once a week or so. The daily use surfaces like the kitchen counters and such get cleaned as soon as they are used in order to maintain a livable space. But, if you stick your hand in my couch cushions, to be honest, I have no idea what you’ll find. If you take out the white glove and start wiping surfaces, well, you may as well buy those things in bulk. I try to teach my daughter about housework by including her in it. But spending hours and hours toiling with a toothbrush at bathroom tile grout just doesn’t make any sense. Not when that means my kid is going to have to spend that time alone. For $400 a month, there are at least 10 different cleaning services that are more than willing to do the job for me.
Throw in the pest control service, the lawn guy, and some landscapers and, for $650 a month, I too could have a home kept up to societies standards. Assuming a salary of $40k a year, that means I only need to work 8 more hours every week to afford it. Well, aside from the eating thing. And an interior decorator. And a shopping assistant. And a wardrobe coordinator. And a crafts specialist.
So my options are to hire all of this stuff out and work my butt off to pay for it, force my child to play alone for a large portion of the time we have each day while I perform these tasks myself, or just not do them at all.
Currently I’m choosing some combination of the last two. I try to spend 30-60 minutes each day cleaning with my daughter’s help. This is, of course, above and beyond the basic pick up and cleaning and laundry and such. And I try to spend another 30-60 minutes cleaning on my own before she wakes up in the morning. This works well for all the small jobs. But for anything that needs more than 30-60 minutes of my time, it just doesn’t get done.
The right way!
So I’m trying to find new ways to do things that allow me to tackle the big jobs in small pieces.
I’m trying to find non-dangerous, child-friendly ways of, fertilizing the lawn, killing weeds, and cleaning hard water deposits out of the shower.
I try to decorate the house in ways that don’t require renovation or lengthy installation efforts. And when something does require some additional time, I try to find people to help.
I’m trying to find people to share meals with. Ideally on a semi-planned schedule. This saves the cost of restaurants and either lets someone else do the cooking or brings someone else around to keep my daughter from being alone as I do the cooking or some combination of the two.
And maybe some day I’ll make so much money that I’ll laugh at myself for ever wondering why people tried to do this stuff themselves.
Whether you’re a single person without kids, a single parent, a double income family, or a stay at home parent with an active lifestyle — if you’ve got any ideas, tips, secrets, or magic tricks about how you get things done, I’d love to hear them.