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.
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