It’s Home & Garden Week at Dallas Voice, and that often means spring cleaning, yard work, getting the pool ready for summer, and the like. But who says you have to do it all yourself?
In my other life as a gay personal finance expert, I write a lot about saving money, but what about time? That’s worth something too, especially if you can save more of it by eliminating some of the tasks you dread doing. From having your groceries shopped and delivered to hiring an occasional housekeeper, here are a few affordable ways to farm out your chores to enjoy life a little more.
Yard work. There’s not much I won’t do around the house –—I clean toilets, pick up the dog poo, I even scrub the bottoms of those nasty trash cans every once in while — but I try to avoid yard work and mowing the lawn at all costs. I just don’t like it, and it takes up more of my leisure time in the summer than I want to give up.
A 2017 survey found that of the 12 hours Americans spend in their yards per week in the summer, more than half are used working to maintain their lawns. But who needs that when there are burgers to grill and margaritas to blend? Hiring a lawn care specialist to tidy up my space so I can enjoy it is worth the cost to me. I don’t usually have the backyard serviced from October to May since nobody uses it for recreation. I still have to mow the lawn a few times in between during the summer, but not nearly as much as if I didn’t have someone doing the hard parts for me. Rates will vary, of course, depending on where you live and how much work you need done, but it’s worth the inquiry if you want to wash your hands of it.
Pool maintenance. Maintaining a backyard pool can almost be a full-time job during the warm months — seems that way, at least — which is not altogether time consuming in four-season locales, but it can take up a lot of time if you have to do it year round. If you want to try out a maintenance service for your pool, ask friends and family for recommendations and collect bids from multiple contractors. You can always try haggling, too.
Grocery shopping. I don’t have my groceries delivered on a regular basis, but I’ve tried several different services to mixed results. The deliveries are fine aside from one or two missing items over the years, but for a couple services it was hard to justify the additional fees that I would have saved by doing it myself. In one case, there was about a $40 markup on the groceries — and that was with free delivery; I decided not to use that service again. But Amazon Prime is typically $99 a year and allows for free two-day shipping on many items.
House cleaning. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2015 women spent an average of two hours and 15 minutes per day and men spent one hour and 25 minutes per day performing tasks such as cleaning, food preparation and laundry. Hiring a cleaning service could save the average family nearly six hours per week.
I recently hired a housekeeper to give myself a break, and it’s really made a difference. My lady comes every two weeks on Fridays (coming home to a clean house at the end of the workweek totally helps me relax going in to the weekend) and she spends about four hours cleaning my three-bedroom home for $70. Very affordable in my opinion, considering that she mops my floors, which is right up there with mowing the lawn on my list of tasks I like to pretend don’t exist.
The fee for my housekeeper is rather low I think (I’m a bargain hunter!), but anywhere between $80 and $120 per clean is quite reasonable, depending on the size of your home.
Pet grooming. I’ve never attempted to groom my dog — it would probably look like Attack of the Flowbees if I did — but some folks do. But why not pamper Fido like you do yourself?
Home energy audit. Is your heating and air conditioning system working as efficiently as possible — even if you don’t have energy-efficient models? You probably don’t know, or you may be trying to fix problems that don’t need fixing because you can’t find the real culprit. That’s where the professionals come in. This service usually costs around $120. Angie’s List is a great resource for more information on a home energy audit.
— Mikey Rox
