Martha Monday--My crew

Martha lives the life. Her meals are excellent, her crafts perfect, her house always clean. How does she do it?

Well, now that she is mega-rich, she has people to do it. Take a look at her blog and you'll see that Martha has an entire crew dedicated to making her busy life work. For her own homes, Martha has a housekeeper and staff, stable staff, a large grounds crew, gardeners, dog walkers and more. And that doesn't even begin to describe the assistance she has at her day job.

I have to remind myself of this when my life is far from Martha-Stewart-perfect.
She has people to do things, like housework, driving, cooking, etc., for her. I do not.

But a few weeks ago, I had a follow-up thought to that one...Why the hell don't I have a crew?

I came up with a few namby-pamby answers for this, but none of them held water. The truth is, I have a buttload of housework and chores that need to be done, but I don't have the time or energy to do it. But I did have a checkbook. Getting a crew to help me out was the obvious solution.

So...I hired a crew of window washers to wash all the windows, sills and screens.


They washed every window, inside and out, in record time. With almost 50 windows in the house, many accessible indoors only by a tall ladder, this would have taken me several weekends to get a job like that done. It took this crew of five less than three hours to get it all done.

I had never hired window washers before, but now that I have, I would totally recommend this to anyone. I was happy with the job and so very thrilled to have it done. Worth every penny.

With the dirty windows taken care of, I turned my attention to the albatross around my neck...the dirt pile in the backyard. It was awful. It was ugly. And all summer long, I wanted to do something about it. And all summer long, nothing got done.

But as it turns out, my checkbook could solve that problem, too. I called two neighbor boys, negotiated a rate with them, and they dug up all the dirt and sand. Sweet guys that they are, they even let my sweet Little Guy help out.

I think they got all the dirt/sand/tarps removed in one weekend. Amazing!

I then had some topsoil delivered and one of the boys was brave enough to return, over the course of several evenings/days, and cart the soil to the pit. And like this window washers, this was another big household job that it made sense to just hire out. Totally worth every penny.

Now, the hole is almost completely level with the grade of the yard, and we are ready for seed or sod next spring.

So my windows and screens are clean, the dirt/sand pit is gone and life is good in the TMI household. Wow...being just like Martha Stewart isn't so hard after all. If you have enough pennies. ;)