Painted the Nursery

With help from visiting family, we finally painted the nursery in anticipation of the birth of our baby in September. My wife had been highlighting that we were not on track to be ready and needed to make some progress on preparations, so we decided step one was to get the nursery painted. We ended up spending about 10+ hours in prep work, painting the walls, and clean up. We left the trim and ceiling as is and spent about $55 in paint and supplies.

Upon reflecting on this project I'm thinking it would have been a smarter move to outsource this small project and hire professional painters. I just had a painter paint a similar bedroom at a rental for $160 including walls and trim (or ~$16/hr). A pro would have likely done a better job and painted the trim.

Given all my recent writing of being time poor this was a good opportunity to buy back time at about $16/hr. While I'm always very conscious of our spending for each project, I need to put more focus on the bigger picture. If I outsourced this low cost painting task, I could potentially work on another project on my very long To Do list. I have to remember this for next time, and fight the immediate instinct to reach for the paintbrush when were ready to tackle the next project.

On the flip side if I did outsource and then spend my time supervising and admiring the work accomplished rather than getting another meaningful project accomplished then I'd be throwing money away.

Related in Outsourcing:

Cost of Convenience (Jul 03, 2012) I'm on an unplanned trip to China for work with 12 hours notice to get on a plane. Its been a mad dash to make travel arrangements and given there has been no time to prepare Ive been been paying...

Best Kitchen Time Savings Technique (Apr 30, 2012) I have found one very powerful time savings technique that has really paid off for us more than any other in terms of saving us time in the kitchen and still being about to eat really well with our busy...

Outsourcing to Balance Time (Apr 16, 2012) I've posted multiple times about how time poor we feel. My wife and I have struggled with finding a balance with our responsibilities and my guess is many working families struggle with this. I feel its likely a particular challenge...