Megan emailed in recently and said:
We always look for ways to cut money — I coupon regularly and take surveys to save and earn money to be able to provide fun money for our family. We try to do most things ourselves and hate to hire since, most of the time, we can do it much cheaper (and better) than a “professional” can.
For six years, my husband and I always bought mulch in bulk and then spent several hours over several days carting it all over the yard with a wheelbarrow and making our islands look nice. Each scoop cost about $32 plus tax and we did it one truck load at a time plus we had to add in gas, time, and wear and tear on the truck.
Doing this up to 20 times in the matter of a weekend can really start to add up and zap the joy out of “doing it yourself”. We even tried having the mulch delivered for a small delivery charge, but we still had the same amount of labor involved.
Well, last spring, it was time to put new mulch out again and we were absolutely dreading it so we hired someone to do it for us. {GASP!}
We decided that it was just too much to do while trying to get my husband’s new company off and running, too. It was a very good decision.
One year later, my husband’s company is providing paychecks and health insurance to eight different employees and we are hiring the same guy to install our mulch again this year.
We have developed a relationship with this man who owns his own landscape company, and because we are repeat customers, he has given us a better price than we could probably get elsewhere. He purchases the mulch we like, brings eight scoops at a time, and has his workers install it — all for $45 a scoop.
It blows my mind that, when it comes down to it, we did all that physical manual labor just to save $8 per scoop! I know when you multiply $8 by 20 scoops, the savings does add up — but, at this season of our lives, it just isn’t worth it to us to both work for almost two days straight in order to only save $160 total.
We will gladly pay the $160 on top of the mulch price for this valuable service.
While we technically aren’t saving any money, we are choosing to pay someone a small amount of money in order to save valuable time — time that we’d rather spend with our children than mulching our yard!
Do you have a fun and frugal DIY idea to share? I’d love to hear about it! Read the submission guidelines and submit it 
aloud at lunch. 
