Families with both parents working FT: what do you outsource and what falls through the cracks?

[Anonymous]

We have a 9, 7, and 4 year old. My commute and hours are long, but am lucky because my husband works from home. Our older two walk to and from school. At the moment, we're not outsourcing anything, but we need to get a housecleaner (any recs for Vienna? We just moved here). I cook a lot on the weekend to ensure home cooked meals, but my husband has used Hello Fresh in the past, and he and the kids loved it (I usually miss dinner time) It's pretty pricey, though, so we stopped.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Funny that husbands in this area are incompetent and can't do handyman stuff. Hope you like getting ripped off.

We had to deal with correcting a ton of DIY "improvements" the previous owners did to our house. Hope you (or your husband -- way to be sexist about who can do repairs) actually know what you're doing.

[Anonymous]

We both work full time outside the home (spouse travels 50% of the time) and have a 3 year old and a 14 month old. We have a nanny for the youngest, preschool for oldest, a lawn service, and a cleaning service that comes every 3 weeks to deep clean. We do a surface clean daily and a light weekly clean (toilets, sweep and vacuum floors, dust) to maintain. We cook from scratch most of the time and do our own laundry, though it doesn't get folded in a timely fashion.

What falls through the cracks? Time to sleep longer than 5 hours at night, to exercise, to rest, to take care of ourselves (salon etc), to go on a date and reconnect...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Also assume you don't have family close by or a nanny/housekeeper.

We have a 3 year old.

We outsource cleaning.

Our laundry falls by the wayside (we don't get to it until the situation is dire -- aka there's little in terms of clean clothing left). We also don't cook for ourselves as much as we should. DD eats balanced meals, but goes to bed before DH is done working, so we eat afterwards. Too often we eat whatever is around or we order in.

We outsource weekly house cleaning, windows cleaning, car regular maintenance, lawn weed service (DH cuts it himself), DC's sports and art classes and tutoring in foreign language, sometimes grocery delivery.

What we don't outsource is meals. We try to limit eating out and I cook fresh dinners practically every day. I supplement some of DC's school work. We keep up with laundry OK. DH does small handyman jobs himself as well as some work on cars (because he likes it).

We need to outsource landscape work because it's starting to fall through the cracks. It would be nice to outsource driving DC to after school activities but I don't know how.

But in general we have plenty of time for everything, we work 40 hour weeks with short commutes. Sometimes we have too many social events and I have to watch for that.

[Anonymous]

I borrowed a friend's lawnmower and timed it once with me mowing the lawn. It took 3 hours including trimming, but not weeding. Our landscapers do it much faster, due to having more people and also they're better at it.

But I don't feel like taking 6-9 hours per month to do lawn maintenance. I'd rather spend that time doing stuff with our family. So we outsource.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Okay...I need to know more about this laundry outsourcing you all speak of!

We have laundry services that will pick up (or you drop off) and return clean and folded. Not something we outsource, but some people do.

We dont outsource much. Kids are in school/daycare. We order in or do frozen or super simple meals more than I'd like but that's about it. DH and I work 40 hour weeks, short commutes. We run errands on the way to/from work. I manage to pay bills etc while at work. We're constantly decluttering so dont have tons of stuff that needs to be organized. Pick up/take trash out/do dishes/etc daily. Bigger cleans on the weekends. Live in an apartment and use zip car so no lawn or car care to worry about, and our walkable neighborhood minimizes time spent on errands. We also order s lot online - not food, but most other things. The internet is our biggest outsource!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Funny that husbands in this area are incompetent and can't do handyman stuff. Hope you like getting ripped off.

We had to deal with correcting a ton of DIY "improvements" the previous owners did to our house. Hope you (or your husband -- way to be sexist about who can do repairs) actually know what you're doing.

NP with a super handy husband. He knows what he's doing, but since he works FT, doesn't have much time to do it. So, non-urgent home repairs fall through the cracks.

I feel like we do a decent job, OP, but we have so many piles of papers (random mail, gazillion kids' worksheets, artwork, etc.) in the house. We outsource cleaning, once every three weeks, and I've been letting the older two buy lunch more than I used to (youngest is still in preschool, so he needs a packed lunch daily).

[Anonymous]

Can someone tell me more about outsourcing deep cleanings? What are you including in deep clean that isn’t on the regular list? Like baseboards, oven, inside cabinets?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is a really weird thread. Most of the stuff y'all say you "outsource" because you both work you'd still outsource if only one of you worked so long as you could afford it. A cleaning service? Yard work? Handyman work? Who with money does any of that stuff themselves? I don't work and we still outsource all of that.

Exactly, which goes back to my original question why assume more falls through the cracks with two working parents. We both work, and I'm not giving up outsourcing when I retire.

[Anonymous]

We have a four year old and one on the way and we don't outsource a thing. My husband is a very private person and have some Hang-Ups around having strangers in the house to clean it. (However to make up for it he is pretty much the main cleaning guy especially for deep cleaning jobs)

We briefly did blue apron but felt like it was a waste of money.

We are definitely more on lower income side of Dcum (hhi is around 140 k so not exactly broke by any standards) but we value being frugal and doing things ourselves. We also have a really good work-life balance and short commutes so that helps.

I could see that potentially changing as we become a family of four.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Okay...I need to know more about this laundry outsourcing you all speak of!

I have a "housekeeper" instead of a "cleaner". I hired a person who would do both, and she comes several times a week for a few hours. It's amazing. I'm from another country where cleaners all do laundry as part of their job, so I was surprised to find that's not the case here. Then I discovered there are people who do this but their title is "housekeeper". Found her on care.com and she's great.

I am considering something like this in a couple of years when my one year starts school.
Can you tell me more? How much do you pay per hour? How many times/week does she come and for how long?
What other tasks does she do?
TIA

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:4 and 6 year olds.

Cleaning
Landscaping
Handyman work
Auto repairs
Financial planning

What falls through the cracks is being hosts. We love to entertain, but it's a lot of work to get it all together so it happens rarely.

I host crappy dinner parties.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thekitchn.com/5-rules-for-hosting-a-crappy-dinner-party-235815%3famp=1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We have a four year old and one on the way and we don't outsource a thing. My husband is a very private person and have some Hang-Ups around having strangers in the house to clean it. (However to make up for it he is pretty much the main cleaning guy especially for deep cleaning jobs)

We briefly did blue apron but felt like it was a waste of money.

We are definitely more on lower income side of Dcum (hhi is around 140 k so not exactly broke by any standards) but we value being frugal and doing things ourselves. We also have a really good work-life balance and short commutes so that helps.

I could see that potentially changing as we become a family of four.

This is us almost to a T and we've continued to make it work with a 3.5yo old and 6mo. Though some personal time has definitely fallen through the cracks.

[Anonymous]

We don't outsource anything except cleaning once a month (and should do that more often frankly), dry cleaning, and the usual home repairs/maintenance stuff that DH can't fix. I meal prep on Sundays, cook a few nights a week, pack my own lunch (kiddo gets school lunch), and we do laundry regularly. I also WAH once a week.

[Anonymous]

I left my corporate job two weeks ago and will start in a new firm and February. So I have a very rare nine week period where I’m off work. I’ve been interested to see what it’s like to have a stay at home mom. And honestly I just don’t see how great it is if I were home all the time. Is that awful? I thought I would get a lot done that is the boring organization stuff. And I have. For example, yesterday I spent the afternoon cleaning out my son’s toy cupboards and arranging everything and throwing out broken pieces. And that was very satisfying. And then the minute he came home he took everything out played with everything. And then put everything back and of course a totally different place. Laundry is another example. Laundry is always in crisis mode around here. Since I’ve been home it hasn’t been, which is nice. But if I’m being honest we wore clean clothes before and we wear clean clothes now. The only real difference is that now my husband doesn’t have to do it along side me when we’re watching tv. Which isn’t much of a motivator for me.

I guess my bottom line is that I’ve always been envious of other families who have someone at home full-time because it seems like things are much calmer. And in my case, yes generally speaking things are a little bit calmer? But it hasn’t made a huge dent like I thought it would. I would say I would be 90% more unhappy if I didn’t have a job but the house will only be like 20% calmer. I don’t know if that makes any sense.