I had someone helping me for a while when the kids were little and I was working and in school. I opted for a "baseline" level of work she could help with. She came over every other week for four hours (we scheduled it so she would already be in the area because of another job to save her gas) and she took care of the floors, washed down bathrooms and the kitchen. We did our rooms ourselves, but to simply have someone come in and regularly run the vacuum and mop the floors was a luxury. Alas, she became ill and stopped working and I never went through the process of finding someone else I liked to do the same work. My sister has a service that sends a crew one morning a month. Though she is a busy executive type, she spends that morning at home supervising on general principals because she doesn't know these people.

Susan, something that occurred to me as I was shopping buckets yesterday was that these two-gallon buckets are actually about a gallon smaller than those flimsy ones I was replacing and they'll be good because they are quite easy to lift when they're nearly full. It seems that some of the standard sizes of accouterments for jobs around the house make jobs difficult because they're not to scale for the strength of the users. I still lug around all of the heavy buckets and boxes and tools, but I might work faster and more easily if some of these things were a little lighter. If you're still fighting with some of the "stroke brain" things to do with dexterity or strength when approaching these jobs as you move, take a look at some of the non-standard sizes I found at Tractor Supply. It means taking buckets meant for feeding horses and using them around the house instead. But heck - they're much prettier than the old Rubbermaid variety, and they are very sturdy.

SRS