All this saving is definitely worth it, but it doesn’t stop me dreaming of what I would spend the money on if we weren’t saving or didn’t have debts to pay.  Of course the sensible answer would be to invest the money or continue saving, but let’s just imagine we have a bunch of savings already and could spend this money on something useful instead.  Of course I'd totally love to travel, but right now as a busy working mum then I’d also want to invest it in all the jobs I hate around the house! 

I really feel like I never have time to sit down or to give enough attention to my children.  I work full-time running my own business and this takes literally every spare second I have.  If I’m not working then there’s always a stack of housework to keep on top of.  It’s never-ending!  The washing machine is always on and I rarely see the bottom of the laundry basket.  The house literally needs vacuuming every single day and I could probably spend all day in the kitchen alone just preparing meals, washing up and cleaning!  Then there’s the constant picking up of toys and mess after two young children!  Managing life as a full time working parent can be super hectic and never ending!

Although I try to see housework as exercise, I’d definitely rather palm it off onto someone else if I could.  I’m sure most people don’t enjoy housework.  Sure, we enjoy the end result of a clean and tidy house, but the constant effort to get it to this state is not so enjoyable day in day out!

If I had some cash to splash then I’d definitely consider getting rid of these boring chores:

Mowing the lawn

This is definitely a dull task in the summer months.  It’s noisy and we have to dig out the extension lead just to be able to reach the bottom of the garden.  The grass always looks amazing when it’s been trimmed, but imagine never having to walk up and down the garden again to mow the grass.  Imagine the grass always looking perfect with little to no effort. Someone cutting our lawn each week, or a robot lawnmower would be the dream here!

Vacuuming the house

Boring.  As mentioned above I don’t think anyone really enjoys doing any of these things, but they are just a must.  Our house needs a good vacuum pretty much every day. 

(On a side note, was anyone else brought up calling it hoovering?  It was only as an adult that someone told me this is a brand and not the correct word at all.  I just thought ‘to vacuum’ was American and ‘to hoover’ was British!)

To make our lives easier we did purchase a cordless vacuum cleaner, but even better than this would be one of those new iRobot vacuums.  Imagine how much time could be saved to do more enjoyable things!  The future is definitely going to be robots doing all these boring chores for us!

Washing up

There are few things worse than jobs which have to be done every day, especially when you’ve already had a long day.  And with four of us here, three meals a day and snacks, I feel like I am always washing up!  By the time I’ve washed one lot up and put it away, it’s another meal time and the mess is back again!  Argh!

Whilst most of you probably have a dishwasher, we don’t.  We did have a slim one, but I found it more of a hindrance than a help.  The quick washes were useless so it had to go on a two hour cycle to clean a full (slim) load.  Then, nothing was dry, so I either had to spend all my time drying it or leave it for aaaaaages to dry.  Not ideal.  We only have a small kitchen and one set of everything so I couldn’t have stuff in the dishwasher for hours at a time or I’d have nothing to use in the kitchen to make the next meal.

I didn’t feel the dishwasher saved me any time as the time I spent washing up was now being spent on drying the items from the dishwasher.  When I wash up I just leave everything to air dry.  I could wash the stuff up and leave it to dry and it would be washed and dried so much quicker, so we got rid of the dishwasher. 

That’s not to say I love washing up, but dishwashers just didn’t save us the time we needed. 

So what’s the solution?  Well, hire a cleaner who comes three times a day to do the washing up for me or find a dishwasher with an effective fast wash that also dries too.  Do they exist?

Cleaning windows

OK so I have pretty much got rid of this boring task.  We have a local window cleaner come and clean all the outside windows for £13 every eight weeks.  So that just leaves the inside for us to clean and, I will admit, it rarely gets done.  I’ll probably do it more in the summer, but in the winter we have the blinds down a lot, so we don’t really see the window mess.

Once the sun starts beaming through and we have the blinds up most of the day then the marks and smears will be glaring at us!

So what’s the solution?  Not that I want to put my window cleaner out of business, but I have discovered there are even robotic window cleaners – oh my goodness!