Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We mow our lawn, rake and bag all our leaves, buy mulch and clean our beds, plant flowers in the spring and fall. We also clean our house, mop our floors, clean bathrooms. I can’t understand how people can afford $150/week for a cleaning service and $50/week mowing service. It’s sooo $$$ in this area.

Ouch, yes! Labor is super expensive in this area, but paying $$ for manual labor frees me to concentrate on whatever I am prioritizing.

As an immigrant, I think it is ridiculous that without affordable landscapers and gardners available, there still exists a iculture of huge lawns and yards in this country.

It's because the basic premise of housing in America was to ape their betters back in England with their verdant lawns on huge estates (the same argument would apply to the debutante balls here too). America is a crabgrass frontier baking in the hot sun but Americans have long wanted to have the gentry appearance of overcast, wet and never hot & humid England. Not even middle-class UK homes try to have the huge pointless lawn but Americans absolutely needs to have that patch of manicured non-biophilic green. Today it is rather comical that Americans spend so much time fighting weeds on non-gardened lawns. Nobody in the UK spends time seeding with non-native grass like Americans do.

Sir, this is a Wendy's.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DH and I are both on billable hours so it just doesn’t make sense. I can pay someone $50 for something that takes 15 minutes, it would take me an hour. I bill 4x that so it’s not worth my time.

This literally makes no logical sense.

Not the PP but makes perfect sense to me. My clients value my time at $2K/hr and my firm values it at about $3M per year. My lawn guy charges about $50/week. Would take me 3 hours to do what his crew does in 20 mins. I work more than 2400 hours per year. Don’t really want to spend the 150 of the ones that I’m not working doing my own lawn. For the price of just more than 90 mins of my time, I buy 52 hours of theirs. Seems pretty logical to me.

This is a very sad way to look at your own life. I used to be you.

Anonymous wrote:My yard takes about 1hr every 2 weeks during a portion of the year. It is so trivial and it gives me a chance to check up on the outside of the house and yard.

+1 and it is pretty important to be in touch with what is happening on your land.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yard work is unbearable in the DMV summer with the humidity and mosquitos. There is nothing worse than pulling weeds, sweating like a pig while being devoured by Asian tiger mosquitos.

And yet you allow someone else to bear it

*pay* someone else to bear it. There happens to be thousands of landscapers who line up for the work. That’s how the market works.

I get it. You don’t have the ability to study something new. Understand plant pathology or variable growth or understand turfgrass as a complex crop to be maximized for visual and functional purposes.

Instead we say our time is worth more. Which may be accurate.

I’ve always thought those who still insist on mowing without truly understanding the plant they’re cultivating are simply frustrated at work and not actually creating something of value. So they try to revert to their agricultural roots in order to touch the earth/create something real. Their spreadsheets are driving them to use 2+ HRs a week maintaining 10,000sqft because they no longer feel their M-F produces real results.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DH and I are both on billable hours so it just doesn’t make sense. I can pay someone $50 for something that takes 15 minutes, it would take me an hour. I bill 4x that so it’s not worth my time.

This literally makes no logical sense.

Not the PP but makes perfect sense to me. My clients value my time at $2K/hr and my firm values it at about $3M per year. My lawn guy charges about $50/week. Would take me 3 hours to do what his crew does in 20 mins. I work more than 2400 hours per year. Don’t really want to spend the 150 of the ones that I’m not working doing my own lawn. For the price of just more than 90 mins of my time, I buy 52 hours of theirs. Seems pretty logical to me.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We mow our lawn, rake and bag all our leaves, buy mulch and clean our beds, plant flowers in the spring and fall. We also clean our house, mop our floors, clean bathrooms. I can’t understand how people can afford $150/week for a cleaning service and $50/week mowing service. It’s sooo $$$ in this area.

Ouch, yes! Labor is super expensive in this area, but paying $$ for manual labor frees me to concentrate on whatever I am prioritizing.

As an immigrant, I think it is ridiculous that without affordable landscapers and gardners available, there still exists a iculture of huge lawns and yards in this country.

It's because the basic premise of housing in America was to ape their betters back in England with their verdant lawns on huge estates (the same argument would apply to the debutante balls here too). America is a crabgrass frontier baking in the hot sun but Americans have long wanted to have the gentry appearance of overcast, wet and never hot & humid England. Not even middle-class UK homes try to have the huge pointless lawn but Americans absolutely needs to have that patch of manicured non-biophilic green. Today it is rather comical that Americans spend so much time fighting weeds on non-gardened lawns. Nobody in the UK spends time seeding with non-native grass like Americans do.

You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about. You can spend thousands on landscaping and not fight weeds in your lawn or overseed at all. Lawns need to be mowed, regardless of the species of grass.

Beyond mowing, if you have gardens and trees and shrubs is that “trying to have the gentry appearance”? Depending on the size of your property this can add up quickly.

Sounds like your dream yard is completely overgrown grasses and no trees or shrubs.

Anything more is just putting on the airs of English gentry.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yard work is unbearable in the DMV summer with the humidity and mosquitos. There is nothing worse than pulling weeds, sweating like a pig while being devoured by Asian tiger mosquitos.

And yet you allow someone else to bear it

You do too, simply by buying groceries someone else grew and picked, living in shelter someone else built, driving on a road someone maintains, etc, etc. All these people work outdoors under all sorts of weather conditions.

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

We do, not my choice. DH does it because he is too cheap to hire people and somewhat likes it, but doesn't have time to maintain anything properly. I have money to pay for this, but if I try, I am afraid we would be divorced I hate it, but I am a clueless urban person who never had a yard. Also to hire a service we need to "remodel" our landscaping which would cost many tens of thousands. We have complicated landscaping with very little grass and mostly different ground covers, flower beds and bushes and many trees. Previous owners were into gardening but then got too old/ill to care for it properly. When we bought it we had no clue what to do, we just went natural lawn, but we aren't on top of keeping it weed free and neat. Don't know TBH how to hire people to not get taken advantage of. Also our neighborhood got too expensive and people who buy homes for 3+ million have fancy landscaping and full services and hike up the prices. We don't bother to keep up, that would be moot.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yard work is unbearable in the DMV summer with the humidity and mosquitos. There is nothing worse than pulling weeds, sweating like a pig while being devoured by Asian tiger mosquitos.

And yet you allow someone else to bear it

You do too, simply by buying groceries someone else grew and picked, living in shelter someone else built, driving on a road someone maintains, etc, etc. All these people work outdoors under all sorts of weather conditions.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We mow our lawn, rake and bag all our leaves, buy mulch and clean our beds, plant flowers in the spring and fall. We also clean our house, mop our floors, clean bathrooms. I can’t understand how people can afford $150/week for a cleaning service and $50/week mowing service. It’s sooo $$$ in this area.

Ouch, yes! Labor is super expensive in this area, but paying $$ for manual labor frees me to concentrate on whatever I am prioritizing.

As an immigrant, I think it is ridiculous that without affordable landscapers and gardners available, there still exists a iculture of huge lawns and yards in this country.

It's because the basic premise of housing in America was to ape their betters back in England with their verdant lawns on huge estates (the same argument would apply to the debutante balls here too). America is a crabgrass frontier baking in the hot sun but Americans have long wanted to have the gentry appearance of overcast, wet and never hot & humid England. Not even middle-class UK homes try to have the huge pointless lawn but Americans absolutely needs to have that patch of manicured non-biophilic green. Today it is rather comical that Americans spend so much time fighting weeds on non-gardened lawns. Nobody in the UK spends time seeding with non-native grass like Americans do.

Nice troll, still, the urban and suburban middle class in the UK lives in what I would consider public housing in the US. It's horrible.

That said, I'm all in on a farm in the Cotswolds... a little bit of heaven.

Well, like I said, mini-me version of English gentry life in America.