Our house sits on a corner lot. For reason, it's a lot more area than the properties internal to the block. In fact, the flower garden we have along the back fence runs the entire 102 feet and averages 10 feet from front to back. That is a lot of mulch. The first 25 bags were a song to load up and get home. After I got done weeding the garden area and applying the mulch, I recalculated how much weight I had just moved.
The bags contain mulch to cover 2 cubic feet and weight 20 pounds when dry, double that when wet. These had some water, so let's go with 30 pounds. 30x25=750 pounds. I put the into the car, took them out of the car and stacked them, took them to the back yard and stacked them, and then took them to the garden and deposited them. That's 3,000 pounds. And I didn't even make it halfway...just short.
When I went to get more, I bought 30 bags. 30x30=900 pounds. Now, I had some help getting them into the car this time, so I only did half, so that's 450 pounds. At home, however, they were all mine. I got smart, though, and took them up to the top yard and placed them on the walking path I had placed there last year. Total of 1,350 pounds.
I'm a proud patient of Dr. Terrence Riley, who has helped me significantly reduce the impact sleep apnea has had on my life. (#ad #sponsored) I'm a proud patient of Dr. Ben Wyant at InMotion Pain Solutions, who has successfully helped me with chronic back, neck and hip pain, and pain from tennis elbow. (#ad #sponsored) I'm also a proud patient of NewLeaf Wellness, and the hormone replacement therapy which has successfully gotten me off the sidelines of life, and more active in my lawn care, gardening, and living the kind of life I want to live. (#ad #sponsored)
I'm one of those guys who would rather do it myself. I wasn't always that way, until I overcame my fear of failing at a project. Since then, I've invested hours and hours after one project after another. Recently, I made one of the best decisions of my life. I hired someone to do the landscaping in front of our home, and to also take care of the remaining mulch in the backyard. I didn't hire him because I couldn't do these projects. I hired him because I wanted to capture the time I would have spent on those projects, and to spend that time with family and friends. And, honestly, when the young man smartly, successfully and quickly completed the projects in half the time I would have taken to do them...it was worth it.
Not only did I find more time in my day, week, month and year, I also found a reliable, dependable and reasonably priced young man to help with projects for which I needed to be replaced, or needed a second. And that's something you just can't buy...so to speak. So, before the next time you start into something, think about the time cost of money, versus the psychological benefits of doing the project yourself, versus the psychological benefits of recapturing that time to spend with the people you love.