Jessica asked

, In my previous post, I asked you to leave me any question you wanted to ask specifically about me or my family to help me get me out of the _____ety_____ blogging rut I was in. I'll be posting these in the order the questions were received. Thanks for helping me out!

My disclaimer: My answers to your questions will be about how we live and what has worked for us. I don't claim to have all the answers!

Jess asked me this:

"Can you tell me about your businesses? Cleaning and real estate...just enlighten me..."

My husband has been in the real estate business for 15 or so years. When times have been slow, he's supplemented with teaching classes at the Real Estate school as well as doing bookkeeping.

We all know, however, how the real estate business has been nationwide... Thus the cleaning business was born.

Since I'm a home schooling Mom, it's a given that I have been a SAHM mom as well.

I first started house cleaning, by helping a friend when she needed extra help. Sunny works out of the house, so he was able to watch Grace when I needed to be gone for a couple of hours.

My friend and I worked the summer cleaning vacation rentals at an exclusive golf resort. It got so busy that she couldn't handle this along with her other jobs, so she handed over that part of her business to me. This is when we began our own cleaning business. Now Sunny and I do it together, and Grace tags along.

I'm thankful that the Lord threw wide open this door for us. It has helped keep food on the table. Sunny continues to do odds and end jobs while the real estate business begins picking up. And it is picking up for us.

Truthfully, and Sunny would definitely agree, cleaning toilets hasn't been our ideal job of choice, but it serves it's purpose for the time being. It's definitely not something we want to do for the rest of our lives.

And now, a fun story.

This particularly golf resort we clean at is a gated community with million dollar homes. Most of these are second homes. You have to enter through security--we call it the 'guard shack'. You have to be on the vendor's list, and sign in, etc.

Sometimes you have to deal with a cocky security person who looks down on you because you're just 'the cleaning lady'. (And what's up with guys and uniforms, anyway?!) I got on one particular fella's bad side, understandably, right off the bat after setting off a couple of security alarms. But hey, it fulfills his need for speed, right?

The problem was that you never knew from day to day what kind of mood he would be in. Some days he'd be the nicest guy, while other days he'd be grouchy as all get out. I was tempted to somehow slip him a couple of Mi*dols.

One morning he had to open up a home for us. I was getting pretty tired of his cocky attitude towards me. He began griping about his 'measly' security-job income. Now it's really nobody's business how much I make, but I just couldn't help myself. When he realized I made nearly three times as much as he did just 'cleaning houses' his cocky attitude went right down that toilet I was cleaning, and he respected me from there on out.

Well Jess, I'm not sure how 'enlightening' that was but thanks for helping me get back in the groove.

Stay tuned for Amber Asked next...


It's All Doin' What Works Good!