One of my plans to keep my budget down was to do all my own lawn care.
Yep, that’s not going to happen.
Last year, I started out with my reel mower. Yes, that’s right, one of those old fashioned lawn mowers that’s just a bunch of spinning blades. Why did I go this route and not get a normal mower? I don’t have a garage on my house and I have yet to purchase a freestanding tool shed. That means that all my lawn tools have to live in my house. I am not about to store a gas powered mower inside my house. It’s just not going to happen. I thought about going electric, but the reviews weren’t much better than the reviews for the reel mower, and I figured the odds were good that I would eventually mow over the cord and ruin the whole thing.
The reel mower wasn’t bad… until I let the grass get too long. Anything over 3 inches and that thing wasn’t going to mow. And that means that it missed all the crazy fast-growing weeds. Not awesome. At one point, I was actually going out with the hedge trimmers and cutting them off. Yeah, that’s embarrassing.
Then I hired the neighbor kid to mow for $30 a pop. Problem? He wasn’t entirely reliable, and didn’t actually do the best job. He was only paid after he did the work, so it’s not like he took my money, but I just wasn’t entirely pleased.
So I went back to my landscaping company to get pricing. For a reasonable fee, they would not only mow, but fertilize, overseed, and treat the yard for various bugs and weeds. Not a bad plan. So for this season, that’s the route I’m going. I’ll decide next spring what I want to do next.
Yes, it’s a splurge, and I know all you frugal folks out there are yelling at me through the computer. But I figure that I can cut back elsewhere and leave this to the pros. Best of all, it leaves me time to do all the other things being neglected around the house.
