The best way to get a project done without doing it all yourself

Do you remember the famous passage from Tom Sawyer when Tom gets Ben Rogers (and eventually Billy Fisher and Johnny Miller) to whitewash a fence for him?

Yeah...my girls and I totally pulled that off this weekend. Actually, it was one of my girls who made it happen.

See this deck? Or should I say see this sorry-excuse-for-a-deck. It looks more like a raft to me.

We're tearing it out! We're paying someone else to lay a patio and do some other work in the backyard (I know! Paying someone to work on our yard!) but it is my job to get the deck demo'd since we're going to re-use some of the wood for a pergola.

On Friday while the girls were out of school for the day, I somehow swindled them into working on the deck demo with me. Brynn, my 9 year old, was enthusiastic from the get-go. It took her enthusiasm to drag my 7 year old, Callie, out of the house to work with us. It helped that I told Callie she could "document" the whole deck de-construction with my camera! So most of the photos you see here were taken by her. Hooray for point-and-shoots.

Callie brought along her new American Girl catalog -- for break time, I guess.

While I pulled the boards off of the deck, the girls pounded nails down and then flipped over the boards and pulled the nails out. When our next door neighbor called to see if the girls were around, Brynn said, "Come on over! And bring a hammer!" And so she did, and went right to work along side Brynn and Callie.

Stacking up the re-usable wood in the side yard.

Then another friend called and Brynn said, "Come on over! And bring a hammer!" This friend laughed at Brynn and told her (several times) that she was crazy. But the friend showed up anyway and, instead of a hammer, dragged along her little sister.

So that makes 5 elementary school girls, three hammers, two drills, and one crowbar. Oh, and me. I would say that the five of them together did about one and a half adults worth of work, which may seem like an inefficient use of energy but, really? Elementary age kids have an endless supply and they were very entertaining to work with.

One of them accidentally used the claw end of her hammer several times when she should have been using the pounding end. One of my girls dropped a long (like 14-foot) board on the other one's foot. When there weren't enough tools to go around, two of the girls sang and danced to keep our spirits high while we worked.

The sixth girl did significantly less work than the rest of them.

This was toward the end of our work day. Do you look this happy (or fashionable)
when you've done that much work?

This was my first time witnessing the Tom Sawyer method of persuasion in action, and I think I'll be using it again. Have you ever used the Tom Sawyer method?