"Any ideas on what I could do there in my free time and get the most bang for my buck?"

Short answer...
something you are good at and that fills a need in your area.

Oh... and something that does not take you away from helping your wife!

How about start a handmade wooden toys business if you have any talent in that area? You could create your own designs and test them out on your own children! And USA made "wood" be a plus.

This post was edited by peegee on Sun, Dec 21, 14 at 17:17

Are you any good at a honey do list? My last two neighborhoods have been in new areas with new construction. I am awful at hanging curtains. I have a huge mirror that isn't hung because I can't do that either. We hired someone to come in and floor our attic and put in a full size access door. I could use shelves in the garage and various closets.

Before that, I had a house I sold. My realtor had a guy who filled in an repainted the cat claw marks off our doors and touched up the paint. He fixed the holes in the sheet rock where the plumber fixed the frozen pipes. I had him fix a couple of cabinet doors that were coming loose and haul off an old freezer. He also replaced the window screen on a window.

You'd need to have licensing, permits, insurance, etc. appropriate for your area.

In our area, an handyman is golden; it is very hard to find good people to do small jobs around the house. The ones who exist are so booked that you might need to wait several weeks for them to come. Many work full time at handyman jobs. I'd guess the average pay for these folks is around $30-40/hour of work, and they are well worth it. Why not put an ad in a local publication or online service and see what response you get. The good handymen in our area do not advertise at all now; they get plenty of work without it.
Renais

have you tried home-based part time jobs? it could be the perfect solution. you'd earn while at home helping out with the kids. win win if done right.

Anything you do is going to be a big financial risk. At one time 3 out of 4 mom and pop type business failed. The article I read also said it takes 3 to 4 years to start getting a profit.

Can your wife quit her job? Figure up what it will cost to have a sitter, add something for clothes she needs for her job, gas and a running car. You may find out that staying at home will be the cheapest way to go.

Or, if your wife makes more than you do, perhaps you could be a stay at home dad while she continues to work.

"Handyman" sounds good, and I would sure like to find a competent one. However, if you already have a 9-5 job (which is probably more like 8-6), you are going to be doing home repairs at night and on the weekends. I think most people would prefer you install the new kitchen faucet sometime other than dinner time. :-(

On the contrary, if I could find a handy man that would come to my house in the early evening, that would be golden! I work full time and getting even a simple repair done can mean taking the whole day off work. Seriously, I bet I'm not the only one who thinks this.

Also, before recommending that the wife quit work, there are a lot of factors to consider. Yes, cost for child care goes down, but many expenses associated with more kids are still there regardless, like a bigger vehicle (the importance of room for properly installed car seats cannot be understated), food, doctors bills. Also, there may be factors at play like maybe he makes more money, but her job has a better benefits package. Maybe quitting work now would have a strongly negative impact on getting back into the workforce later. People automatically say, oh it's just better for someone to quit work (usually the woman), but life is usually more complicated than that.

I think life is only complicated if you make it that way. I was a stay at home except for two years after a divorce. I took care of the finances and never over extended ourselves. We bought a new home, when I was 20, but I chose one less expensive than we could have afforded. During my second marriage we lived in one of his rentals until we could afford a new home. We rented out mine. In the end we ended up with 3 new homes during our marriage with me staying home and being frugal. Very uncomplicated and secure. It seems now that people don't wait for anything, they want it now!!!

Whatever you do, do NOT fall for the "home-based business opportunity" where you sign up to be on someone's team, buy inventory, and sell what they sell ... MLMs are a money pit!

Your 15-20K works out to clearing $300 a week, average. I paid my last handymen $250 for 4 hours of fixing a lot of minor issues like sticking doors and such, and the drywall repair guys $150 for about 2.5 hours and a bunch of small repairs. They work full-time on nothing but small repairs that the larger firms

If you combine that with some SEVERE money management on the home front (cooking from scratch, minimizing take-out and fast food runs, mending and refurbishing) you can probably make it happen.

Make it something that can't be done by others - the handyman approach, and some hand-made stuff should do it.

Look at the projects at ana-white.com ... you could make and sell these locally - collect for materials and part of the labor up front, rest on delivery. The toys and children's furniture should do well, the made-to-fit media centers and sofa tables too. They are easy, but power tools intimidate people.

Just make sure you have all your permits and licenses lined up: some states are slack, others aren't.

I agree that there should be a great opportunity for a handyman to work evenings and weekends when the homeowner doesn't have to make special arrangements to stay home from work.

Good luck!

Thank you all for your suggestions. Handyman seems to be an ongoing theme. To answer your questions...yes I am handy and could likely make it work on nights and weekends. Licenses and insurance could be prohibitive as I am not formally educated in any type of construction or trade. Will see what I can do though.
I am hoping for something I can plug away at every day in my workshop that has some value (like a crafted or grown product) rather than spending time just looking for a $50 lawn mowing here, a $40 repair there etc...Don't get me wrong, I'm motivated and every little bit helps, but with 3 kids under 3 we are very limited on time. Working a min wage second job could be more favorabe than the time it will take just trying to line up random jobs from week to week.
One of us quitting or job is not an option. We have a mortgage and health care costs we need to cover.
Thanks again

One thing to consider is that if you're doing a crafted or grown product you still have to market it in some way. If you make wooden toys, for example, it's not just crafting doll beds or whatever. You will have to devote your weekends to going to craft fairs to sell them. Or spending the time finding shops that might take them, often on consignment. Or you'll have to spend the time developing an etsy shop and then finding the time to get to the post office/ups store to ship them out.

I did the small business selling crafts thing and it was very hard. It tied up my weekends (travelling to shows). Some shows I did very well at, some shows I didn't even meet my expenses to go to the show (table or booth fee, travel costs). I gave it up when I realized I made more money on a more regular basis at my part time job.

Grow micro-greens to sell at the farmers market? I've been seeing trays at my local market and they seem more profitable then just growing veggies. I did not buy any so I don't know how they were sold. You could do some research on that and since I am a gardener I can tell you that there would probably not be a lot of start-up costs and the growing would be easy and not take too much of your time.

Dog/cat boarding? Day Care? Grow mealworms to sell to pet stores or bait stores. Grow exotic/heirloom/baby vegetables or Shitake mushrooms to sell to restaurants.

Advertise in Craigslist.

Think of what you like to buy at flea markets or farm markets. Think like the Amish. What do they make that people like to buy? Can you cook?!
Are you able to make custom bird houses/feeders? Can you fix lamps or radios? Go to a local fair and talk to the people who have booths. You can either rent a space for a nominal charge or meet someone at a fair you have an interest in and strike up a conversation. Someone might not mind sharing the future cost of a table if they know someone is willing to help.

What about providing a service on a regular basis? Put an ad in the local paper. It doesn't have to be temporary. Mowing yards can lead to landscaping work, can lead to gutter cleaning or snow plowing.
I've hired tree workers to clean my gutters when handymen were too busy. The possibilities are endless!

If you're going the handyman route...remember to get bonded and insured. You're going into other people's homes. Protect yourself and your new business.

We brought a house with a sheet metal shed. Well, it was crushed by the weight of snow. It's currently in scrap yard. It was really ugly anyway. At Home Depot they sell really good looking ones made out of wood. They even have shingles on the roof. The interior dimensions are probaly on average about 6 x 4 feet. No body in your area making custom sheds ? Talk about cornering the market.
But, as sloedjinn pointed out, you're gonna need a way to market them.

I'd call up Dave Ramsey, the get out of debt guy with his Financial Freedom seminars, and see what suggestions he can give you. It won't cost you anything, and he may have some useful ideas, including extra jobs. I know one he recommends is delivering pizzas part time.

The very first thing I must say is you must like what you're doing. If you're in it just for the money all you will have is another job.

How good are you at woodworking? Because I'll tell you there is a market for good old American made wooden toys. Every toy today has to have batteries and requires no imagination to play with.

Now I know this is not for everybody, but do a Bing image search for handcrafted wooden toys. There are people making these and selling them at craft fairs. I know crafters who make anywhere from $500 to $1,000 in one day. There are many like me who walked away from the corporate life to do this full time. Both my wife and I left our stress filled corporate jobs back in the 1980s to do this and haven't regretted it one bit.

We really don't have enough facts to give meaningful advice. Lots of people are handy but how good are you, and more importantly how good will I think you are. A couple of people have said wooden toys but when I looked on Etsy they seemed really cheap. I could be underestimating time but there you go. I make mission style furniture but there is a large tool investment and a very serious learning curve. Inside of a year you could be making an outstanding profit but a year is a year. A weekend lawn care service is a great bet, it is really really hard to lose money in lawn care, but you are probably never going to make a fortune. None of this means anything without us seeing your work and knowing your start up position. Best of luck to you.

If you were smart, or lucky, you would line up several lawn care jobs in the same neighborhood, thus limiting your travel time and maximizing your profit. The man who built my dormered bathroom actually makes a living at handyman work (that's about the biggest project he *likes* to take, but he'll go bigger if he has to.)

Although many people speak of hand-crafted wooden toys, I wonder if you'd be able to sell them for a price that makes it worthwhile, or if people in your area will compare it to a made-in-China lookalike and swoon that the price you'd have to charge.