Capitalism works!!

A couple of weeks ago, Michael issued a challenge to the boys....clean up the bookshelf in the school room. He offered to pay $25 for the job divided up by whoever decided to work. He told the boys that when he got back from Italy, if the job was done, money would flow. One super sweet thing was that cleaning this bookshelf was on my list of things I wanted to do this summer...which by the way, my list is still long and my summer is getting very short. How does that happen???!!!

Here's the bookshelf "before". Sorry the pic is so blurry.

Lots of stuff, every which way. I'm so thankful to have the built-ins, but it's gotten out of control. Though, I still knew mostly where to find things, no one else did.

So, Jonathan and Jeremy took the challenge! I added a $5 bonus for including the closet that is in the schoolroom. I ended up doing the closet myself, but that was all I had to do. J&J did the rest.

Here's the "storm before the calm".... Notice the ihome on the white desk....the boys turned on Adventures in Odyssey and let it play....

Scenes like these are (I think) the reason why Michael wanted this project tackled while he was away in Italy. Messes like this cause a serious lack of peace to my dear hubby! There were also 3-4 boxes of NEW school books to be unloaded and put somewhere on the shelf.

About 6 hours and 12 episodes of AIO later, the bookshelf now looks like this...

Yeah! Straight books, empty space...lovely! We had two boxes of books to take to HalfPrice Books to sell, a box of stuff for Goodwill and now a very organized closet in the schoolroom as well.

J&J actually got $20 each for doing such an excellent job. Michael admitted that he didn't know it would be such a big job when he asked them to do it. AND they finished the job before he even left for Italy....impressive!

Paying people for working....and paying them well for working well....now THAT'S a great idea!!