How to go about outsourcing domestic/household work

[#2ontheway]

I have been thinking a lot lately about how I feel like I am working constantly. I work a certain number of hours each week for pay, but I work far more than that when I take into account the additional hours that I do volunteer work and domestic/household work and child care. We have the usual imbalance in our household. I know I’m not alone in this, and I am very very aware that we are fortunate for many reasons and I am truly grateful, but still. I have the opportunity to take on more work for pay but that is out of the question so long as I’m also doing all this other work. Plus I’m grouchy about it. I would really love to have more time for myself.

(The obvious solution would be to start by addressing the imbalance in our division of labor, but to be honest, this is not going to happen. My husband would run a household in a different way, and it just won’t work for me to live like that, and I’d make myself crazy trying to change him - in fact, already tried that many times, so it’s time to think about another solution.)

So I’m trying to figure out how I might be able to outsource some of this domestic work, probably after school gets going again and our lives are more structured. But I’m not sure where to start to even figure out what work can be outsourced, and how many hours we’d need, and what hours would make sense. Have any of you done this? Should I literally take a few weeks and try to track hours spent doing laundry, tidying, cleaning, shuttling kids, special projects (cleaning out a cupboard, that kind of thing), maybe even meal planning and prep and grocery shopping? And should we be thinking about having someone come multiple times a week? I really feel lost for how to go about this. I know not everything can be outsourced and I will still need to make the doctor’s appointments, plan extracurriculars, do the school forms, that kind of thing. I’m really trying to think realistically about what could be done by someone else.

We do get our house cleaned every three weeks, so I could probably make that happen more frequently, and maybe she’d be willing to do some laundry too. I really have no idea how many hours a week I spend doing laundry, so maybe that alone would help enough? Anyway, thanks for any ideas!

[jgenie]

When I needed extra help, I started with my cleaning lady. We moved from weekly cleaning to having her come twice a week every other week and her usual once a week the other weeks. Tell her what you’re looking for. Laundry, dinner prep, 5:00 tidy of the living spaces? Tell her what you need and see if she’s interested in more hours to help out. If she’s not available, I would post your needs online. Give detailed info regarding hours and tasks to be completed.you can start with a few hours and increase if you see that you need more help. For me I love laundry so I have always handled that. When my kids were little I really needed someone to watch them while I made dinner. I hired a sitter to come a couple days a week from 3:00 - 6:00 just to keep them outside while I made dinner and cleaned as I went. I was getting stuff done but it was so nice to be able to do it without constant interruptions. If you’re not using grocery delivery, I would embrace it now. It saves so much time. A Costco run costs me 3 hours between driving, shopping and them putting everything away. Instacart is about $15 over cost plus $15 tip. On my crazy weeks that $30 is well spent.

[DualvansMommy]

I outsource as much we can. Husband still helps especially with yard/physical work around house, but we always still have that imbalance due to mental load of remembering & scheduling the annual physicals, debtal, allergist, & derm appointments and of course sick appts. My answer was I still handle that but wanted to outsource everything else since I took on a full time paid position 18 months ago, and have gotten promoted with a pay raise.

We get weekly landscaper to cut the grass, handle fallen trees branches from storms, spring & fall clean up, mulching & planting. We also use same guy for our snow/winter needs with snow plowing/shoveling work.

We used to have bi weekly house cleaner but she comes weekly now and makes all the bedding once a week. I outsource dry cleaning that is picked up and dropped off at my house bi weekly.

Groceries is always either deliveries or curbside that husband goes to pick up. I used to have different meal kit services like blue apron etc, while it’s ok for the summer since we often at at the pool or eat out. Im looking to hire a personal chef to cook us 4-5 meals a week for this fall as life will be insanely busy with our return to office on hybrid schedule, sports, no virtual school options.

Maybe ask around in your local FB group for a house keeper? Someone who will do the food shopping, prep your groceries, clean your house, make appointments for all of you? Pay 20 hours a week so a college student who is virtual or a young retiree may fit the bill. Or SAHM mom in your neighborhood who’s looking for flexible hours like school hours with money to earn.


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[Myira]

I can relate to most of your post. I feel like I work round the clock and yet I’m having a backlog of house cleaning and housekeeping. I’d never been setup with a regular house cleaner in this house and then the pandemic we weren’t comfortable getting anyone over. I’ve also been reluctant to setup regular house cleaning since the kids as well as DH drive me nuts when asked to put their junk away.
Finally, last few weekends I spent insane amounts of time getting caught up. Then a week after that, I took the plunge and called a local cleaning company I just found on google. Well I had a very bad experience with them, so I’m unlikely to ever call them again.
But now I found another lady who came over to walk t tough my house and is going to start coming every 2 weeks. I mainly am hoping she atleast does the 3.5 bathroom which seem like they suck up my time the most. Then once in a while she can do deep cleaning like blinds and baseboards. I will get some breather to organize stuff and just regular upkeep.
DH does mow the lawn and load/unload the dishwasher. But all of the cooking and cleaning is not only my business, he acts as if those are unnecessary activities I engage in, which drives me up the wall. His tolerance for clutter far surpasses mine. I’m also no Martha Stewart but I have a certain threshold beyond which I cannot function in mess and just have to declutter and clean first before I can live. Telling DH how much this bothers me does not help anything. He is very encouraging of hiring help though, but finding someone is not easy honestly. DH and I share the laundry chore though I fold everyone’s clothes(asking them to do it results in drawers stuffed with unfolded clothes), I’ve tried bit not yet succeeded at making the kids do their own. Grocery delivery which I’ve only discovered since this pandemic is a life saver.


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[hbridge]

We started last summer with basic yard help and this past fall with a twice a month cleaning person. There is still a lot that still falls on me, but the stress of "I have to clean the house" is no longer as big.

For the yard, DH and DC (and a little bit me) do the gardens and the vegetables/fruit, but the guys come and mow the lawns, which is a big help.

I still do all the laundry/sheets/towels, the grocery shopping, most of the cooking, all the kid planning, ect. So there is still and stress about schedules and trying to fit everything in, but it is nice to have the help.

[mommy111]

You need a housekeeper. I’d start there with 20hrs or so a week and then take it on from there. If you guys are foodies, you may need a personal chef added on to cook once a week or so but I generally would prefer the daily fresh food that is non fancy to week old refrigerated food

[AnnieW625]

We had a cleaning person off and on for about 13 years when we were working outside the home and the kids were younger (dd1 was about a year old
when we started and she was 14 when we moved last summer). We had a really small 1200 sq. ft. house that I had problems keeping clean. I never had my cleaning person do my laundry. When I end up with too much laundry I ended up at the laundromat on a Sunday afternoon, but that was actually a really rare occurrence. I guess I am just picky about laundry like that.

Now that we have a house that almost double the size of our old one but other than buying a new couch/love seat set and coffee table (when we moved in last August) we haven’t really accumulated that much stuff and I feel like the house is easier to clean. I did buy a robot vacuum and for the most part it helps keeping the house less dusty and the area rugs clean.

Food wise we had a variety of meal prep. boxes (Blue Apron, Martha Stewart, and Hello Fresh) for a good portion of the last 3-4 years, but last fall I realized that we really didn’t need them any longer so I stopped getting them on a regular basis. I occasionally end up with an extra box from Hello Fresh (the only one I decided to keep) when I forget to go in and skip the delivery so it is nice to have on those rare occasions. I honestly don’t think we could’ve afforded a house keeper that also prepared meals or someone who picked up the kids from school daily. Again it is all about priorities and we just made due with what we had the easy options for (like using onsite daycare at elementary school vs. having to go through the hassle of hiring a nanny, etc). Due to the high cost of hiring someone in my old VHCOL area I doubt I could have paid someone just $150 a week to buy groceries and prep and or cook 4-5 meals a week (plus the cost of groceries) so for me the meal prep boxes made the most sense because the cost was $125 to $150 for the pre portioned ingredients to be delivered to me, and most of the time I enjoyed cooking a meal from scratch even at 5:30 every night when I got home.


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[dogmom]

You’ve gotten some good suggestions to yourself original question. But as someone that is a little older with a 15 and now 18 year old I encourage you to examine some of the underlying issue when you catch your breath. I don’t know hour values, expectations or general temperament, and they all play into this. Add to that societal pressures and your marriage and it is a lot of threads to tease out and examine. All I can tell you is that coming out from the other side is it gets somewhat easier, but it also gets lonelier. So much time is taken up by just stuff and chores and mor stuff when the kids are younger it’s ridiculous. My kids didn’t continue sports in HS so that freed up a lot of time. Then I could just say, “feed yourself” at times. They got put in charge of their laundry and a I just don’t go into their bathroom anymore. Some of this is I need them to learn to do basic stuff now so they are adults. At the same time I’m relearning what it is to have blocks of unscheduled time and how to manage it. I wish I had started the process earlier of figuring out what a I really want to do with my time and not get caught up in what other people want. (seriously, how did mani/pedis become and actual self care thing? I don’t get it.). It now has me reading, walking dogs, sometimes hiking, cooking food I want to cook and the family can learn to like it. I don’t need to have parents of my kids friends over anymore so I don’t care if my house doesn’t look like theirs. I spend a lot more time with my DH than kids now. A I have fewer friends and that’s fine. I’ve tried to step back my intensity of my work.

I know this seems all so overwhelming now. But no amount of outsourcing really got at my issues. I’m in a much more settled place now. (I swear a good chunk of it was hitting menopause and getting rid of those annoying hormones.) So try all those things posters are suggesting, but learn to let some things go. I learned if my kitchen and bedroom as clean I could cope with everything else, for example. I also stopped worrying about school forms. If they got in late, they got in late. I stopped worrying about it. Yearly checkup 6 months late? They were fine. Meanwhile I tried things out, stopped thing to change things around me, and just was. Also if your spouse is telling you to do what you want that makes you happy, believe them and do it. Don’t start making a list of why you can’t go away or go to the gym or whatever because X, Y, Z. Most of the stuff really is unnecessary that we get caught up in. If you are doing it make it because that is a positive choice you are making.

That’s all I got.

[wallawala]

I'd start with picking the most awful annoying task you can think of and outsource just that first! You can build from there.

Low hanging fruit is to up the house cleaners to every week. Since she's there more often, try adding laundry on and see how it goes.
If you hire someone to work for you 20 hours a week... that's a household employee and you should be carrying unemployment insurance and paying taxes. It's a big hurdle to set that up initially. If you are hiring a business to (like a cleaning service or cleaning lady with her own business) they handle all that not you, so start easy!

Every one has different pinch points so who and what to hire out will vary so much.
I personally love laundry, and easy to throw a load in here and there.
Lawn care, NO Fing way I'm doing that... hired it out!

If you need tips to get DH on board with balancing invisible work, try reading Fair Play (Eve Rodsky) or Drop the Ball (Tiffany Dufu)
If you need tips for yourself on what to focus on try reading The Lazy Genius Way (Kendra Adachi)

I find my mental health is so tied to a decluttered house, so I pick up for me. Not for anyone else, but weirdly it's become a treat not a chore since it's just for me. Still a process, and still working on getting the kids to do their share because as DogMom said they need to learn to basic stuff to be adults.

[niccig]

You’ve gotten some good suggestions to yourself original question. But as someone that is a little older with a 15 and now 18 year old I encourage you to examine some of the underlying issue when you catch your breath. I don’t know hour values, expectations or general temperament, and they all play into this. Add to that societal pressures and your marriage and it is a lot of threads to tease out and examine. All I can tell you is that coming out from the other side is it gets somewhat easier, but it also gets lonelier. So much time is taken up by just stuff and chores and mor stuff when the kids are younger it’s ridiculous. My kids didn’t continue sports in HS so that freed up a lot of time. Then I could just say, “feed yourself” at times. They got put in charge of their laundry and a I just don’t go into their bathroom anymore. Some of this is I need them to learn to do basic stuff now so they are adults. At the same time I’m relearning what it is to have blocks of unscheduled time and how to manage it. I wish I had started the process earlier of figuring out what a I really want to do with my time and not get caught up in what other people want. (seriously, how did mani/pedis become and actual self care thing? I don’t get it.). It now has me reading, walking dogs, sometimes hiking, cooking food I want to cook and the family can learn to like it. I don’t need to have parents of my kids friends over anymore so I don’t care if my house doesn’t look like theirs. I spend a lot more time with my DH than kids now. A I have fewer friends and that’s fine. I’ve tried to step back my intensity of my work.

I know this seems all so overwhelming now. But no amount of outsourcing really got at my issues. I’m in a much more settled place now. (I swear a good chunk of it was hitting menopause and getting rid of those annoying hormones.) So try all those things posters are suggesting, but learn to let some things go. I learned if my kitchen and bedroom as clean I could cope with everything else, for example. I also stopped worrying about school forms. If they got in late, they got in late. I stopped worrying about it. Yearly checkup 6 months late? They were fine. Meanwhile I tried things out, stopped thing to change things around me, and just was. Also if your spouse is telling you to do what you want that makes you happy, believe them and do it. Don’t start making a list of why you can’t go away or go to the gym or whatever because X, Y, Z. Most of the stuff really is unnecessary that we get caught up in. If you are doing it make it because that is a positive choice you are making.

That’s all I got.

I wanted to chime in with the same - let some of it go. I used to be much more concerned about the house and getting things done. Now, with me being busier, I’ve learned to let a lot of that go. Sometimes I’m too busy and the house falls apart more, we get it picked it back up when we get a chance. Dinner some nights is super simple, take out or it’s later in the evening. We all ate and that’s all that matters. I used to create more stress in my life trying to get it all done. Cut corners as you need to to stay sane and get through things


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