I just mentioned spending some money yesterday and I have to admit that we’ve been thinking of another expenditure. Since I’m Lazy and I’ve been concentrating more and more on this blog and other side businesses, I’ve found that I haven’t been able to keep up with some chores around the home. There’s a chance that we are still overloaded from the wedding planning and the post wedding clean-up, but more than likely we’ll need to look into a more permanent solution. Yes I’m talking about getting some kind of cleaning service. We’ve thought this might be a once a month thing where we’ll take care of the maintenance cleanings in between.
So with that housekeeping out of way here’s some other “housekeeping” of this blog…
- A note about the 100,000 visitors announcement. In January, I mentioned that I cracked 10,000. Last week I mentioned that I had 100,000 visitors. I realize these are probably not very important to you and may be considered wasteful posts. I would feel the same way reading it – wondering “What did I really gain with my time – reading that?” For this reason, I won’t be mentioning until 500,000 or 1,000,000 visitors.
- We were happy to be included in a couple of carnivals – the Festival of Frugality and the Carnival of Personal Finance
- In honor of Harry Potter’s book opening tonight here are some Muggle Money Mistakes that I felt deserved highlighting. Now if I can just figure out why Hermione does use her clock to go back in time and fix everything in every movie…
Lazy,
I personally enjoy traffic update type posts. When you are part of a community, albeit loosing related, it is nice to celebrate with others. When a friend celebrates a milestone you shake their hand and say good job. You are happy for them.
Posts like that share the real side of bloggers. It shows that they are proud of what they have done, not that they are an endless impersonal stream of articles. If it is important to you, it will probably be important to your readers. That is just me take.
200,000 by thanksgiving!
Hey Lazy,
I’d be curious to know what the pricing is on something like a cleaning service. I’ve often pondered that idea myself.
BigZaphod, we need to look into it as well. About 5 years ago, in my exuberant days, my roommates and I paid $120 for twice a month cleaning of a 1200 sq. place in Boston. I’m hoping that we can once a month at less than $75 around San Francisco. We’ll have to price it out and I’ll give a review on the results once we implement it.
Once a month won’t be enough, trust me. We have cleaners come every two weeks and after about a week, we were wishing we had them come every week. It costs us $72 for about 1200 sq feet cleaned in our 2400 sqft house. We only have them clean part of the house because two of the guest bedrooms and bath rarely get used. We’ll have them clean those for an extra $10 if we expect visitors. It is SOOOO wonderful to come home from work and your house be clean :)
While I feel cleaning service can often be money well spent. Time is the most valuable commodity we have, I feel uncomfortable with using cleaning service. I know it’s not really valid, but something about hiring other people to clean up my mess for whatever reasons seems like too much. I realize it’s irrational, but that’s probably only reason I’ve actually never gotten cleaning service.
In South Jersey, I would pay about $60 for someone to clean our 950 sqft condo. This is someone would be recommended, and might not have the best english. Any companies are outrageous, at the ones I looked at.
My wife hasn’t been able to actually give us the go ahead on the cleaning person. She still feels like we can do it, she only works about 18 hours a week. I personally would pull the trigger.
When my wife and I got married, one of our first big arguments was over cleaning duties (or lack thereof) once we bought our townhouse. We have an 1800 sq ft townhouse and live in a NYC suburb. It would take practically all Saturday each weekend, killed what little free time we had together on the weekend and was just a real mess all around, especially because we both resented doing it so much. And I should point out, I lived to the age of 35 without a cleaning service, doing it all myself, but there’s a big difference between cleaning a one-bedroom apartment (which is what I lived in most of my adult life) and a 3-bedroom 3-story townhouse.
We found a good cleaning service in North Jersey that comes in once every two weeks, cleans everything in the house from top to bottom and costs $70. They don’t speak great English, true (Portuguese) but they are experienced enough that we can communicate with them pretty easily on key subjects related to cleaning and scheduling. Talk about the weather or how everyone is doing? Not so much.
I think $140 a month is expensive, and we did debate it before hiring them, but particularly now that we have a baby they are indispensable. It is one of the few non-essential services that we have that we both agree is worth every single last penny spent on it, and I would never ever go back to doing it ourselves unless we were forced to, because it made such a tremendous difference in our free time (not to mention cuts down on the bickering)! I recommend getting a service 100%.
My wife is on maternity leaves right now. However, once she go back to work, we will both come back from work around 6:15 and have two kidz to feed right away. I will definitely consider this option at that time. Cleaning is so boring anyway! I rather spend my weekend with my kidz and wife (and also playing golf !) than cleaning my house for 5 hours!
Will you look in the newspapers or ask neighbors to find one ? that was my only concern. I want to be able to trust the person that will come into my house…
Cheers,
FB.