Services To Simplify Your Life

I hate grocery shopping and doing laundry. Two of the most essential household chores make me want to curl up in a ball and hide. I’ve used a grocery delivery service off and on for several years now but this week I decided to try out a laundry wash & fold service to see how it works and whether it was something I could justify in my budget. In the interest of cutting down on the time wasted spent doing chores I have a list of chores you can hire someone else to do for you.

Food

As I’ve mentioned above, I really dislike grocery shopping. Whether I have a carefully planned list or I’m just throwing things into a cart as I see them, I’m unhappy and stressed the entire time I’m in a grocery store and I usually end up leaving without half the things on my list – I just want to get out of there. I’m also finding that planning, prepping, cooking a meal after a long day is frustrating. All too often the solution is a fast food solution that’s not doing anything for my waistline.

Grocery Delivery

Grocery delivery services, if you have one in your area, solve that problem allowing you to schedule your delivery at a time convenient to you (as early as 7am or as late as 9pm with most services). These services also allow you to make lists of your regular items so filling out your order could take as little as 2-3 minutes as you check off the items you need. The search feature on the site also allows you to quickly find and add specific items. I keep a running grocery list on the site, adding items as I think of them.

Meal Prep

For those evenings when the idea of coming home and spending time making dinner is the last thing you want to do there are many meal preparation and delivery options available. I have not tried any myself but I’m planning to in the not too distant future.

Household Chores

Unless you enjoy doing chores, and I know some of you do, you’re spending a lot of your free time on chores you could hire out.

Lawn Care, Yard Work, Snow Removal

Everything from grass cutting, fertilizing, hedge trimming, flower planting, weeding, and snow removal can be inexpensively serviced by local businesses or students.

Housekeeping Service

Many inexpensive options here as well. Depending on the service you could have someone come in daily, weekly, monthly or for special occasions to clean floors, bathrooms, windows, and some will even do laundry.

Wash & Fold Laundry Service

If I had a dollar for every hour I’ve spent schlepping laundry up and down stairs… this is another chore that is time consuming yet necessary and if you have your own washer & dryer it makes sense to do your own, I certainly did for many years as a homeowner. For those of us living in a condo or apartment without your own washer & dryer this can be a huge time wasted. Depending on your local service they either pick up your laundry or you drop it off and a few hours or days later it’s clean, folded and ready to put away.

I tried out this service for the first time a week ago. I dropped off 3 loads worth of laundry and a couple of days later it was washed and neatly folded. I had all of it put away within 5 mins and it was still warm. Pricing it out it worked out to be approximately 4x the price of doing it myself in my building’s coin-operated laundry room but the fact that it freed up approximately 3 hours of my time made it a bargain.

Pets

I don’t have any experience myself with these services but I’m told that you can now hire poop scoop services, pet grooming, nail cutting, dog walking, pet sitting and even doggie day care! Fido and FiFi are taken care of!

Shopping

Most of us have shopped online at least a few times so this doesn’t sound that unique however I wanted to point out that Amazon.com has a Prime membership option that gives you free delivery on most of their products. I’ve recently ordered everything from a toilet plunger to hand lotion to a roll of wrapping paper and received them the next day. If you’re a student (or someone in your household is) you can try out Amazon Prime for 6 months absolutely free.

Do you have any favorite services to help simplify your life?