There are pluses and minuses to living in both a house and apartment. Many individuals dream of homeownership, especially Millennials who are now adults. However, housing prices in many cities make that impossible.
If you do happen to move from an apartment into a house, you’ll probably have more room, which is nice. You’ll also need to keep both the inside and outside clean and orderly, though. If you can’t or won’t do that, it will reduce the home’s resale value when you’re ready to move on from it.
Also, if you don’t keep the inside of your house clean, some health risks go along with that. For instance, if you don’t dust and vacuum, you’ll constantly cough and sneeze.
You can deal with the indoor and outdoor cleaning and maintenance yourself, or you can pay someone else to do it. You’ll have to look at your finances to determine which one makes sense for you. You’ll also have to think about your physical condition and how motivated you are.
Let’s look at four chores you can either do yourself, or else you can pay someone to do them.
Indoor House Cleaning
A bedbound patient can avoid bedsores if their caregiver turns them every two hours. Bedsores can be pretty painful, but some people would still prefer them over a few hours of housecleaning.
Housecleaning usually includes dusting, changing the sheets on the bed, vacuuming, scrubbing the kitchen floor, emptying the wastebaskets, cleaning out the fridge, and so forth. You can do all this yourself unless you’re not physically capable of it because you have some ailment.
At some point, the question becomes whether you’re willing to dedicate the time and you have the energy to do these tasks yourself or whether you feel like it’s worth it to pay someone. If you do get a professional cleaner, they can charge a wide range for their services, depending on what you put on the list of things you want them to do.
Most professional cleaners want to do a “deep cleaning” before moving on to regular, less intense cleanings. The deep cleaning will probably cost a few hundred dollars for a decent-sized house. After that, each subsequent cleaning can cost anywhere from a hundred dollars to several hundred, depending on how big the residence is.
Lawn Mowing
Moving outside the house, you can contact a landscaping company to mow your lawn if you’d like. During the later spring months, summer, and early fall, you’ll probably want to mow your lawn every week or so. You can probably do it every two weeks if it has not rained very much.
If you have a large lawn and you don’t have a riding mower, that’s usually when it makes total sense to contact a professional landscaping company to handle it for you. However, if you have a smaller gas, electric, or battery-powered mower, you might also hire a neighborhood teenager to do it for you. That way, you can probably get away with paying them a lot less.
Snow Shoveling
Snow shoveling is much the same. You can likely hire a neighborhood teen to do it if they want to make some extra cash. They’re young, and they probably have healthy backs and legs that can easily perform manual labor. By the time you approach middle age, it’s doubtful you’re going to want to do it.
If you have a large driveway, though, or you live in an area like the Northeast that gets huge snowstorms in the winter, you might need to hire someone with a truck to plow the driveway instead. You can often use Facebook or another social media platform to see who in your area does it.
Gutter Cleaning
A landscaping company or a handyperson will often clean your gutters as well. If you have trees close to the house that drop their leaves in your gutters every fall, you’ll probably decide to hire someone eventually.
You can always get a ladder, put on some gloves, and do this yourself, but many people won’t want to. It’s a dirty job, and it’s also dangerous getting up there. You can fall off the ladder and severely injure or even kill yourself if you’re not careful.
Whether you’re looking at indoor or outdoor chores, a time will probably come when you’re not willing to do all of them anymore. It’s always a question of whether you want to save money or inconvenience yourself.
