When to Pay Someone to Clean Out the Gutters or Ask Your Brother for Help

One of the setbacks (or at least in my mind) to owning your own home as a single woman is that you have three options on how to keep up with home maintenance:

1. DIY: With this option it helps to know what you are doing. I’m not talking about easy things like mowing your own lawn or painting the walls inside or hanging pictures. Every woman, single or not, should know how to do these three things. I’m talking about the hard stuff like, fixing the lawn mower that died while you were mowing your own lawn, or cutting down a tree, or cleaning out a thicket of wild plants without getting bit by a snake, or even cleaning out the gutters. Ok that last one should seem easy but if you are scarred of ladders then it can be an issue. Point being if it is something that intense things can get broken and you could get hurt if you don’t know what you are doing. 

2. Pay Someone: This option can get pretty pricey, for example. When I bought my house last year, I viewed it, loved it, put an offer on it, and closed on it all in a matter of a month. A month without rain. Then as soon as I moved in, it started to rain and rained for the rest of the summer. My yard became a swamp. You couldn’t get to my front door with out walking through the small creek that once was my front walkway. And forget trying to go play with the dog in the back yard. It was ridiculous. My father, the engineer J (no comments allowed on that statement), just happen to be visiting during one of those monsoon season type of pour downs and decided to walk my yard to watch the flow of the water. He then devised a plan of attack, even drew out a diagram (again no comments from the peanut gallery), and told me to call a landscaper that specialized in drainage issues. As any good daughter should, I followed Daddy’s directions and called around and got some estimates. All of which rounded up to about $1500 to $2000! Which leads me to the next option…

3. Ask friends and family for help: This option can be quite humbling to do. Especially if you struggle with “I CAN DO IT MYSELF” syndrome like I do. As stated in the last part of option one, things can get broken or you could get hurt trying to do something that you haven’t the least idea of how to do properly. To finish on the story in option two, I decided to ask my parents, siblings, and friends from church to help me dig up my front, back, and side yards and lay down drainage pipe along with catch drains. Of course I got sick the day before with bronchitis and strep throat and couldn’t do any of the work. How very convenient… Truthfully I was bummed, I wanted to help but I couldn’t get out of bed. Thank God for His blessings and provision of friends and family!

At any rate, I have now come across two more home maintenance jobs that are forcing me to decide between the above mentioned three options.

The first is my lawn mower broke while I was mowing the lawn last weekend. I could just go buy a new one, but that would leave me with having to put it on a credit card. Not normally recommended. I could read the operation manual and try to fix it myself, and if it doesn’t work, simply borrow my brother’s lawn mower for the rest of the season. Or, I could take it to a lawn mower repair man and pay them to fix it.

The second is slightly more embarrassing. The other day I looked up at my gutters and saw that there is a small tree growing out of it. A TREE! On no, I am one of those people now. I have a tree growing out of my gutters. And it’s not just in the back where no one can see it, no it’s in the front of my house right above the front door! So, do risk my life and climb up a ladder and clean them out (which is a terrifying thought for me), call someone out to the house and pay them to clean them out (I may not have the funds for that depending on how much it cost), or do I bite the bullet and swallow my pride and ask my brother or brother in law to come and help me?  Decisions Decisions……..