by Kara | May 30, 2024 | Home, Organizational, Residential
If you’ve decided you need household help but aren’t sure you have enough for a household assistant to do, think again. Besides doing laundry, tackling meal prep, and handling other everyday chores, a skilled household assistant can organize your home inside and out and help you tackle the dream projects you always hoped would be possible.
Everything a Household Assistant Can Do
Chances are, if you’ve considered a household assistant, it’s because you’ve felt the pressure many busy professionals and overwhelmed moms feel—your to-do list keeps getting longer, and it seems there’s never enough time in the day. All the behind-the-scenes planning and anticipating you do often leaves you little time for yourself and the things you love.
But there’s hope. Even if you thought household assistants were just for celebrities or that you didn’t have enough for an assistant to do, there are several ways an assistant can organize your home and give you your time back. In fact, in all the homes Pepper’s assistants have worked in over the last 12-plus years, they’ve never had a problem finding enough to do!
At Pepper’s, we have a team of more than 30 highly skilled personal assistants ready to help you tackle a broad array of household tasks and projects. Upon entering your home, your assistant will look for opportunities to make improvements, organize household chores, and create a system for completing them efficiently. You’ll have a household guide that outlines everything from your favorite grocery store to the location of your water shut-off valve.
You can rely on your household assistant to handle tasks such as:
- Planning travel (including packing and unpacking)
- Decorating for holidays
- Doing laundry (including making dry cleaning runs)
- Planning and managing home parties
- Shopping for groceries and running errands
- Preparing food
- Taking out trash and recycling
- Scheduling and supervising on-site vendors
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Your household assistant can also take your home organization and special project ideas and make them a reality. Examples include creating a home art space, transforming outdoor areas to be more enjoyable, and finding home service contractors for maintenance and repair jobs.
The support you receive from a Pepper’s household assistant isn’t one-size-fits-all; it’s flexible to adapt to your specific needs. And if we don’t have a household assistant that fits the criteria you seek, we’ll find one. So, if you need an assistant who cooks, we’ll find someone who can cook your preferred cuisine. And if you need an assistant that’s great with pets, no problem! Our goal is to help you build a collaborative, stress-free relationship that meets your immediate and ongoing needs.
Steps You Can Take to Determine Your Household Help Needs
It’s not always easy to visualize what a household assistant can do for you day to day. That’s why Pepper’s assistants are trained to work with you at your pace, offering support and suggestions to ensure a smooth transition of chores from you to your assistant.
A great way to create a clearer picture of what your life could look like with a household assistant is to start with a list. Itemize all the things that you would love to never do again that someone could do for you. It might be doing laundry, standing in line at Costco, decluttering countertops, or making Amazon returns. Whatever it is, add it to your list.
As you continue this process, you’ll begin to see you’re probably spending more time on household chores than you realized. One study found that unpaid household chores took an average of 21.5 hours per week—three hours a day!
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Tackle Household Chores and Much More
Imagine what you could do with three more hours in your day. You could spend more time with family and friends, reconnect with an old hobby, or even find a new one.
These are the kinds of benefits Libby Wagner enjoyed once she began working with her Pepper’s household assistant. In a case study of Libby’s experience, we discuss how her assistant took time-consuming chores off Libby’s to-do list and helped her complete dream projects that made her home more enjoyable. Having household help transformed her home and life.
“I’m able to spend the time I need to on my business, which is a lot, and then I get to enjoy my home and my life and the precious unstructured time that I have not taken up with doing errands and chores,” she said.
To learn more about Libby’s experience with her Pepper’s household assistant, download the full case study.
by Kara | May 13, 2024 | Home, Organizational
Spring is the perfect time to refresh and rejuvenate your home after the winter months. The garden is coming back to life, and it’s becoming warm enough to open the windows and let in some fresh air.
With the help of our handy checklist, you can manage your household and keep everything clean, organized, and operating smoothly.
Spring Household Maintenance Planner for Working Moms
As the old saying goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” However, it’s easy to forget or put off home maintenance if you don’t have a list of what to check for and a method for keeping everything organized. One survey found that 68 percent of homeowners don’t have an annual home maintenance checklist or routine.
Completing your annual spring-cleaning is easier with an “organize my house” checklist and some prioritizing in advance. In fact, there are a variety of tools out there to help busy moms plan and schedule household tasks. They include:
- Apps such as Trello and Asana
- Home management books
- Free printables for home organization
No matter what method you use to prioritize and schedule your home maintenance to-dos, consider adding the following items to your checklist:
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Exterior Repairs and Maintenance
- Check for damage to your home’s exterior, including the foundation, siding, roof, and gutters, and identify vendors to help with repairs.
- Inspect caulking around doors and windows and reseal as needed.
- Identify any areas of pest or insect damage and schedule a preventative or remedial exterminator visit.
- Spruce up outdoor spaces by cleaning patio furniture, power-washing decks and walkways, and testing exterior lighting.
- Begin cleanup of lawn and consider hiring a professional landscaper for pruning, mulching, and garden planting.
- Clean out the outdoor grill and firepit.
- Schedule lawn irrigation system startup and annual testing.
- Schedule pool opening.
Interior Decluttering and Maintenance
- Do a walk-through of each room and determine what needs to be reorganized.
- Donate or sell items you no longer need.
- Identify furniture and furnishings in need of repair or replacement.
- Deep-clean carpets and reseal wood floors as needed.
- Clean windows, drapes, and other upholstery to remove built-up dirt and allergens.
- Dust surfaces throughout each room.
- Test and replace batteries in smoke detectors and carbon monoxide alarms.
- Organize garage and storage spaces as needed.
HVAC, Plumbing, and Appliance Maintenance
- Schedule a professional inspection and cleaning for your HVAC and plumbing equipment, including:
- Furnace/boiler
- Chimney interior
- Septic and well systems
- Sump pump
- Water softener
- Dehumidification system
- Replace HVAC air filters and clean heating/cooling vents and returns.
- Inspect faucets, toilets, and pipes for leaks and signs of damage and repair as needed.
- Clean and descale dishwasher, washing machine, and other appliances to maintain efficiency.
- Replace refrigerator water filters as needed.
- Run an oven self-cleaning cycle.
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How Pepper’s Personal Assistants Helps Busy Moms
Keeping up with household maintenance can feel overwhelming. And if you’re managing household chores, childcare, and your career, you may be like many moms who feel even more stretched. In one survey, 93 percent of moms reported feeling burned out.
Thankfully, there’s hope. At Pepper’s Personal Assistants, we understand how hectic your schedule can be as a working mom, and we’re here to help you plan and organize your lengthy to-do list. One of our highly skilled household assistants can help you easily tackle your spring checklist, so you get it all done and have more time for the people and things you love. From organizing clutter to scheduling maintenance appointments and supervising repairs, your assistant can handle it all. (You don’t even have to be home for it to get done).
To see how much time you can get back in your day, download our free resource: What Your Life Could Look Like with a Household Assistant.
by Kara | May 9, 2024 | Organizational, Parenting
If your wife is responsible for raising the kids, managing the household, or working outside the home, she likely has far too much on her plate. Not only must she handle the day-to-day of a never-ending to-do list, but she also has to carry the mental load of making sure it all gets done and on time.
However, the overwhelmed mom in your life doesn’t have to manage these tasks alone. You can do a lot to support her and ensure she doesn’t feel responsible for making everything happen.
Why Overwhelmed Moms Need Support
Parenting comes with many challenges for moms and dads, and it’s not always easy for either parent. But moms often bear much of the responsibility for parenting and household management—even if they’re also working a full-time job.
A Gallup survey of married and cohabitating couples found that despite women making up nearly half of the workforce, they handle most of the childcare responsibilities and nearly all household chores except car maintenance and yard work.
Moms are often responsible for:
- Managing kids’ activities (homework help, school pickup and drop-off, play dates, and so on)
- Scheduling appointments
- Performing household chores, such as cleaning, meal prep, and laundry
- Shopping for groceries and running other errands
- Organizing family events and vacations
In any given week, full-time working moms can quickly become overwhelmed. They must keep up with laundry, cook, and manage a cleaning schedule to avoid being paralyzed by a messy house. They also carry the mental load of all the behind-the-scenes work that keeps everything running, such as:
- Managing the household calendar
- Anticipating child and household needs several days and weeks in advance
- Evaluating the pros and cons of childcare and household decisions and making those decisions
- Monitoring household operations and child-related tasks and stepping in when things don’t go as expected or new tasks come up
For many women, this constant mental juggling can lead to stress, exhaustion, and resentment, which can negatively affect their mental health. A CVS Health/Harris Poll survey found that working mothers have been diagnosed with anxiety and depression far more than the general population (42 percent versus 28 percent).
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Ways to Support Stressed and Overwhelmed Moms
With the mental load of all their household and childcare responsibilities, it’s no wonder many overwhelmed moms are also becoming frustrated. In a 2023 Skimm survey, 64 percent of women agreed with the statement, “I am tired of trying to be a super mom, super wife, and/or super employee.”
The pace of life and all its responsibilities are unlikely to slow down, but here are some ways to take the pressure off your wife to be “super” everything:
1. Acknowledge and show empathy for how she’s feeling.
Often, people struggling in any area of life want to be heard. If your wife feels stressed, overwhelmed, or burned out by the mental load of childcare and household chores, listen to her concerns and show her that you care.
You can do this by:
- Assuring your wife that her struggles are valid and understandable
- Reassuring her that feeling overwhelmed is not a sign of failure
- Reminding her that she’s not alone
2. Lighten her mental load.
Multiple studies have shown that women carry more of the mental load of childcare and household duties. While there are many causes—societal expectations, unequal division of labor, and others—it’s better to focus on possible solutions and what you can do to help.
Here are some ideas:
- Talk about it: Discuss what you can do to help take some tasks off her plate.
- Share accountability: Recognize that helping isn’t occasionally taking on a task. It’s taking complete ownership of something from start to finish, so she doesn’t have to worry about it.
- Encourage her to delegate: Help your wife understand she doesn’t have to do everything herself. When she does delegate, be consistent in your support and show her you can be relied on to follow through on your commitments.
3. Get help from a household assistant.
Outsourcing household chores helps overwhelmed moms cross more off the household to-do list without doing it all themselves. With a household assistant, the busy mom in your life also gets more time to spend with family and other passions.
A household assistant can perform tasks such as:
- Laundry
- Grocery shopping, running errands, and making returns
- Paying bills
- Making and rescheduling appointments
- Supervising repair technicians and taking deliveries
- Planning family travel and other activities
Become a More Supportive Partner
There are only 24 hours in a day, and busy working moms shouldn’t spend every minute of it planning, organizing, and performing household tasks. With your help and partnership, you can lighten the mental load of managing childcare and household responsibilities, giving your wife more time for family and self-care.
To learn more, download our e-book, What Your Life Could Look Like with a Household Assistant.
by Kara | Apr 24, 2024 | Home, Organizational
Of all the time-consuming household chores out there, laundry is one of the most frustrating. You can only avoid laundry for so long, and when the piles of clothes keep growing, so does your stress level.
If you’re an overwhelmed mom at the end of her rope, there are some things you can do to “lighten your load” and manage your laundry with fewer headaches.
Why Doing the Laundry Is So Challenging
No matter the size of your family, laundry can be a tedious chore—and one that never gets permanently crossed off your to-do list. The moment you think you’re done, there’s more laundry ready to go in the washer.
For many moms, the whole process of sorting, washing, folding, and putting clothes away is exhausting. When life gets extra busy, it’s not unusual to have clothes sitting in the dryer all day or clean clothes that never make it back to the closet.
If doing laundry eats up a lot more of your time than you’d like, you’re not alone. Research has found that the average mom spends an estimated 3.5 hours on laundry each week, totaling five months of her life spent on laundry by the time her child reaches age 18. Imagine what else you could do with five extra months of time!
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5 Tips to Help Overwhelmed Moms Stay On Top of the Laundry
Though laundry is necessary in every household, full-time working moms are too busy to spend more time on it than is necessary. Between your career, family responsibilities, and other household chores, you have more than enough on your plate.
If you’re wondering how to keep up with laundry and avoid feeling paralyzed by a messy house, take the stress out of laundry day with these practical tips:
1. Set a realistic and repeatable wash schedule.
Depending on your family size and lifestyle, it may be easier to have set days for doing laundry rather than making every day laundry day. For example, you could set aside a morning or afternoon and finish all the laundry in that time frame.
Alternatively, you could set up a weekly schedule in which you commit to doing a specific number of loads on specific days. There are also apps, such as Todoist or Home Tasker, that can help you create and stick to a laundry schedule that fits your family’s needs.
2. Don’t wash after every wear.
Many clothing items—such as undergarments, socks, and T-shirts—require a wash after every wear, but others do not. For example, you can wear jeans and some sweaters more than once before washing them. By washing these items only when they become soiled or stained, you can reduce your weekly washing load and avoid the premature wear and tear of those items.
3. Fold clothes as soon as they’re done in the dryer.
Taking clothes out of the dryer immediately often provides the satisfaction that one more load is done and off your to-do list. But folding and putting away clothes right away does more than give you a sense of achievement: It also helps you cut down on wrinkles and save some ironing time.
4. Sort laundry throughout the week.
If you’re already an overwhelmed mom, you’ll likely become even more distressed at the sight of an enormous pile of unsorted laundry. However, if you pre-sort dirty laundry right after you wear it, you can quickly grab a load for washing without having to sort it first.
There are different ways to sort: You can place hampers for whites, colors, and delicates in a central location, or you can make it easier for everyone to chip in by placing sorting hampers in bedrooms. The next time you need to throw a quick load of whites into the washer, the items will be sorted and ready to go.
5. Enlist some help.
Of course, all the laundry needs to get done, but it doesn’t all have to be done by you. You can split laundry responsibilities among household members—or save time for everyone by outsourcing laundry duties to a household assistant. A household assistant can do the laundry, put all the clothes away, and keep your laundry room tidy and stocked. A reliable assistant can also make dry cleaning runs and tackle many other household chores for you and your family.
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Get More Hours Back in Your Day
Household laundry is too time-consuming to manage without the right help and an efficient system for getting it all done. By outsourcing chores to a trusted household assistant, you could say goodbye to ever doing laundry again and go from being an overwhelmed mom to a content and unstressed mom.
To learn more, download our e-book, What Your Life Could Look Like with a Household Assistant.
by Kara | Apr 4, 2024 | News, Organizational
At any point in time, you have a lot going on. Between your career, kid-related activities, and household responsibilities, you sometimes struggle to ensure it doesn’t all collapse around you.
But just because you aspire to have it all doesn’t mean you have to do it all. With the help of a household assistant, you can cross everything off your to-do list and fit quality family time and self-care into your schedule.
The Challenges of Balancing Work, Family, and Personal Time
If you’ve ever felt there’s too much to manage and not enough time to do it, you’re not alone. A recent study found that most working parents are stretched too thin, with 66 percent saying they feel burned out. Working mothers have a particularly hard time because they shoulder many household responsibilities without help. More than one in four (28 percent) working moms in the study reported managing family responsibilities alone during weekends, and 41.3 percent said they managed them alone during the week.
The weight of family and household chores leaves most working moms with little to no personal time. According to a 2023 Motherly study, 62 percent of moms get less than an hour to themselves each day. If you can relate, you know how frustrating it can be to lack time for yourself and the things that matter most to you.
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How a Household Assistant Helps
Time is one of the most valuable yet scarce resources we have. However, for working mothers who feel pressure to be a supermom and do it all, it seems there are never enough hours in the day.
If you’ve ever felt paralyzed by a messy house or like you’re on an endless hamster wheel of trying to be a great career professional, mother, and friend and make time for yourself, there’s a viable solution! Getting much-needed help from a personal assistant provides the freedom you need to focus more on what you want to do and less on what you have to do. Research shows outsourcing household chores can even feel more rewarding than a salary increase.
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Here are three key benefits you can enjoy by making this time-saving (and life-changing) investment:
1. More Time for the Things That Matter Most
Instead of spending the bulk of your evenings and weekends on draining household chores, such as doing laundry, washing dishes, or making appointments, you can outsource these tasks to a household assistant. Think of all the time you’ll have for family and personal activities when you have someone to take ownership of completing all those chores and clearing them off your plate.
Your assistant can handle the following tasks for you:
- Doing laundry
- Shopping for groceries and preparing food
- Making returns and running other errands
- Paying bills
- Walking the dog
- Making and rescheduling appointments
- Supervising repair technicians and taking deliveries
- Planning travel, including packing and unpacking
2. A Less Stressful Life
Carrying the mental load of everything on your to-do list is draining enough. But spending hours on chores while you feel guilty neglecting the things and people most important to you is also stressful. However, you can remove those stressors with a personal assistant who can bring more organization and order to your life and household.
When you work with Pepper’s Personal Assistants, we take the time to understand your household needs and match you with the ideal household assistant for you and your family. Once your assistant is up and running, you’ll need only a 15-minute weekly check-in with them to gain the peace of mind that comes with knowing all the chores are getting done the way you would do them yourself (or better!).
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3. Household Help Without the Administrative Headaches
Working with a household assistant doesn’t have to include the added responsibilities of managing payroll, taxes, and labor law compliance. When you hire a Pepper’s personal assistant, you get experienced household help, and we do all the rest. We manage everything from your assistant’s pay and payroll taxes to their health benefits and performance reviews.
Work with Seattle’s Trusted Source of Personal Household Assistants
Life is too short to spend on household chores that rob you of precious time with your family and other passions. By delegating those chores to an experienced and trustworthy household assistant, you can enjoy more of life while keeping your household running like clockwork.
Discover how to put more hours back into your week, and download our guide, What Your Life Could Look Like with a Household Assistant.
