Hiring Help for Household Jobs

Susan Sabo at Productivity Cafe has a great article on hiring out household tasks. One little snippet: Some of you are thinking, "I'm perfectly capable of trimming my bushes, painting the living room (and I always wanted to do faux finishing!), or doing my own laundry." And, I ask, "If you had a half-day without the responsibilities around home, would you be more refreshed to perform better at your job, as a life partner or spouse, as a parent, or as a member of your community? Or, would you maybe just have more fun or 'get a life'?"

More on this topic:

Jennifer Mulream at MSN Money has an article entitled Why it pays to hire help at home. Jennifer spoke with Kathy Fitzgerald Sherman, who wrote a book entitled A Housekeeper is Cheaper Than a Divorce: Why You Can Afford to Hire Help and How to Get It. Kathy recommends looking at your list of tasks not just with the question of how much it would cost to pay someone to do it for you, but also with these three questions in mind:
- What do I most hate doing?
- What requires the least amount of decision-making?
- What are the most time-consuming tasks?

A recent survey of Canadians shows that 29 per cent get help with housekeeping, while seven per cent hire out gardening and landscaping. Other tasks that get hired out include washing the car, cooking, household repairs, home renovations, pet care, household accounting, running errands, car repairs and the transportation of children to school, daycare or extracurricular activities.

And the readers of Real Simple hire out washing the car, heavy-duty cleaning, and mowing the lawn.

Personally, as I noted on Susan's blog, I hire out yard maintenance (which I dislike doing, so it tends to not get done if I don't hire it out) - as well as painting and landscape design (which maybe I could do - but certainly not as well as the pros - and it would take a huge amount of my time.) Getting someone else to do these few things has been a huge help to me.

[photo by qBaz / Adam Hirsch]