Tuesday tip: Economical activities

Sometimes, it actually works out better to outsource some of your activities. Yes that's right, it sometimes is more economical to pay someone else to do your jobs!

Let me explain. If you can find someone to do your ironing for say, $15 an hour and you need two hours worth of ironing done, isn't it worth it for your time and sanity (not to mention time that you could spend with the family) to outsource this task? Would you get more than $30 worth of happiness, sanity and down time from it? I know I would!!

Things to consider:

• What is your hourly rate of pay? Could you earn more in two hours doing your own job vs doing the outsourcing task? If you could, it is better economy to outsource it!
• Will you save time and sanity? Why do something you dislike intensely if you can outsource it and save the effort?
• Does it free up some time that you could put to better use? Spending time with the kids/other half/pets or having some valuable personal time?

Jobs that you might consider outsourcing:

• Cleaning
• Ironing
• Shopping
• Gardening
• Childcare

Head over to With a Fork to read about outsourcing food shopping with a food box delivery service. If it sounds like your kind of thing and you want to try it, there is a discount code for your first box!

Do you outsource tasks? What works for your household?

Tuesday Tip: How to differentiated between the folded sheets

We have 3 sizes of beds in our house. A king single (for the little man), a Queen (for the guest room) and a King (because more often than not every single person and dog in the house is sleeping on mum and dad's bed)

We didn't plan it this way it just evolved as our family grew. So we never really planned a good way to tell the sheets apart as well (i.e. All the king single sheets will be blue ish. Queen Green and King will be red). Also I have moods and would never be able to stick to a colour scheme anyway. 

All our sheets also go together in the linen closet stored in their set pillow case (a very handy tip I picked up from lifehacker) But besides the little man's stand out truck sheets, a lot of our other sheets are somewhat similar in colour (including a set of aquamarine sheets we seem to have for every single size bed) Once folded, these are impossible to tell apart. This is especially so when we have to change sheets in the middle of the night while we were nighttime potty training. 

So I came up with a plan. King Single Sheets were folded and slotted into a pillow case which was laid flat. Sheets for the little man were folded again on the diagonal so that they could be immediately identified by the triangle shape. Queen sized sheets were also folded again but on the vertical so that it formed a small square. Now when we go grab a new set of sheets to make the bed we don't have to undo the whole sheet and have to refold it if we didn't get the right size.