Yes. A hob wall is a low wall backing onto the bench just as you have described. It does mean you cannot use the bench for a breakfast bar, but I don’t like them anyway, and we have used a hob wall in each family home we have lived in. It means you can still be part of anything going on without your family or guests see you sticking your fingers into their food LOL.

We top our hob walls with a six inch plank of timber, usually the same as the benchtop timber, or painted to match the architrave. It gives you somewhere to show off something nice, or somewhere to place plates on their way to the table.

Cheers, Wylie.

Why not have a bet each way. Open the wall between kitchen and living but leave a 12 inch “hob” wall to hide the kitchen mess. It still gives an great open feel without having to look at the mess (at least, MY kitchen is usually messy).

Wylie

Only thought would be that put an advert in the local paper. If your pool is accessible by truck, people building a pool will love that they don’t have to pay a fee for dumping their soil somewhere. You should not have to pay anyone for soil. If a truck cannot get up to your pool and you are willing to shovel and barrow, at least you could do it at your own pace.

We had real problems finding a home for our pool soil and would have loved to have somewhere local to dump it because our alternative was paying for several trucks to travel to the outskirts to an approved site where there was a large fee for leaving our soil.

Just be aware of the fire ant issues. You need to find out where the soil is coming from and get the okay from the appropriate people.

Wylie.

I would not take out contents insurance because I assume you don’t have any contents in the house. Just take out building insurance so it if burns down before you settle you are not just buying a pile of ashes.

When you renovate, just increase the insurance to cover the cost to rebuld from scratch. Don’t forget to add things like clearing the block, removal or demolishing a damaged building etc.

Wylie

I totally agree with fernfurn. Get it rented from day one and no hassles with building. Save that for later in the scheme of things.

Wylie

I would try to not pay for the second plumber. I agree that you don’t have much weight in the matter because the PM is holding the money, but I’d be giving it a try.

I manage our IPs myself, have done for about 25 years. My parents have managed their own IPs for 30 years. I could count on the fingers of one hand the problems we have had over that many years.

I have never wiped a tenant’s nose. We give each tenant our list of trusted electrician, plumber but ask them to call us first, in case it is something we can fix. While many people advise against getting to know tenants, we have to because we manage them ourselves, and have had good relationships with most of them. The people in one of my parents houses are in the arts and give them free tickets fairly regularly. It is a two way street, we treat them well and they respect our houses.

I think, Dazzling, you need to take a chill pill. I find managing our IPs a breeze, mostly. Sure, we have had occasional problems, but I find tenants are people just like me and most are reasonable. Of course, it helps that we live very near our IPs and are happy to spend half an hour if it saves us $180.

I admire your posts and success, but personally, give me residential tenants all the days of the week. I want a simple life, and while I really enjoy reading about your trials and tribulations and huge successes, I do not want to experience any of it personally. I read about your clean ups and dealing with bikie riff raff, and thank goodness for the residential tenant. You can leave them all to me, the more the better.

Wylie.

Personally, we have a shower over a bath, which I loathe, but we had to make a choice and couldn’t fit a bath and shower and I had heard so many times “you must have a bath” we went that way..

My close relative who used to sell real estate always said you MUST have a bath if possible. Most families want a bath. I know with our IPs that on the rare occasions a family wanted to rent, they definitely want a bath if they have smaller children.

When we had our three babies, we used to shower them mostly, me holding them while hubby stood by to hand them in and out. We had a huge clawfoot bath and to bend over that huge bath to bath a little one was back breaking, so we opted for showers.

I suppose my point is that this is a very personal thing. I love having three toilets in our house and couldn’t imagine going back to one.

My advice would be to ask a couple of the local real estate agents what their opinion is. They know what people are looking for in your type of house, in your type of area.

If you are purely doing this for your own living, do what you feel is best for you, but don’t forget you will want to sell the house at some stage, and believe me, people can be fickle when it comes to buying houses. I know some sales that have fallen through because the trim colour was wrong, ant caps were missing, etc. So getting the bath right could be the straw that makes or breaks your sale down the track, silly as it sounds.

Wylie.

Seqrents do take private house ads but I have tried a couple of times, a couple of years ago with no answers. Their site has a lot of apartment complex type properties and this seems to be where their expertise lies.

Wylie

We have a separate loan which we use if we need to top up our repayments on our negatively geared last purchase. Our broker said many clients do claim the interest. Our accountant said not to take the risk.

Much as we respect our broker, we chose not to do anything that will jeopardise our position regarding the ATO. I have heard audits can be pretty gruelling and I like to sleep at night.

There are plenty of legal, non grey areas that we can claim.

Wylie.

I don’t know if you self manage or not. It sounds like you do and if so, get a copy of the ingoing condition report. As far as I am concerned, he should be up for cleaning the house and grounds to a standard that he started with. Of course, he is not up for general wear and tear but as far as dirty windows, shower recess etc, he needs to leave it how he found it.

I don’t know about guttering. I would think you cannot hit him for cleaning the gutters out. That would be your responsibility I would think as a maintenance item.

About a year ago we had tenants who turned into a nightmare. They left a skip full of rubbish and by the time we got them out, I was so worn out by the mental anguish that I could not face cleaning their pigsty leavings.

We got professional cleaners in. It cost us under $300 (from memory) but they did a fantastic job. We also paid for a skip and we had the locks changed. These tenants had stopped paying rent and by the time the paperwork was in order to get them out, our bond did not cover our clean up costs. All up it cost us about $1000 but I am pretty cool with that. I look at it as an expense that is a rarity, it is tax deductible and let me stay clean and sane.

I wouldn’t want to pay it to too often though.

I’d push for him to keep paying rent until he actually leaves and try to appeal to his common decency to pay you any back rent he can so you can keep the bond back and deduct any cleaning he neglects to do from the bond.

Wylie.