Tag Archives: house

Mid Week Musings…

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Its been lovely and quiet at work, I’ve really enjoyed the chance to clean out cupboards and get (almost) fully caught up with my paperwork. One person has left our team so their work will fall on the rest of us but since they were a very unpleasant, difficult person its almost worth it to not have to put up with them!

We have slate floors in most of our house instead of carpet. In this very cold winter we are having its cold walking on the floors when you get up in the morning or be in bathroom in the mornings. So I’ve decided that this weekend I’m going make a few rugs for the floor. I have quite a few old towels that are getting a bit bare and holey and a huge fabric stash. I’m looking forward to having a weekend DIY project for the house!

Speaking of the house, its in real need of a lot of work. The gardens are overgrown and a lot of the shrubs need pulling out and trees need to be removed. Most of it is still the original gardens planted 30 years ago. And once the garden was stunning. But as we both got various injuries and money ran out when we both lost our jobs, spending time and money in the garden just didn’t happen. The yard looks terrible and is filled with half finished projects. So I’m trying to make a realistic plan for what we can accomplish to improve it over spring/summer, starting with just pulling out all the old, dead shrubs which will take me a while.

I always find the second half of the year easier to get through than the first. Work settles down a bit from the chaos of first term, and I take my holidays which are about 9 weeks away. This year I am taking 6 weeks off so when I get back its just the run down to Christmas. I’m feeling quite positive about how we’re progressing towards our goals for 2018 at the moment!

Rates time!

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Its that time of the year when council rates and strata fees bills arrive. So I’ve just paid them for each of our investment properties:

IP #1 rates- $377  strata- $491
IP #2 rates -$283  strata – $523

We have separate offset bank accounts for each property so that any money in that account helps to reduce the amount of interest we pay on the loans. All the rent is paid into the specific account and all the deductions for that property come out of it. It makes it very easy at tax time.

The rates for our house are paid automatically each week. I pay $60 and that will get us a bit ahead in payments. I’d like to start next year with a nice buffer of savings on all my bills. The annual bill for our rates is $1532 paid quarterly ($383 per quarter). We also pay for water here and I noticed our water bill has gone up – so I’ll have to look into that more closely on the weekend.

We’ve had a few days now to try out the outdoor blinds in really hot weather. They have definitely made a difference to the heat inside. Most days we’ve only put the air conditioning on for a few hours in the late afternoon and just used a fan during the day. We’ve still got the big awning to go up out the back this weekend and a few more windows I need to buy blinds for.

Its a bit cooler here today which is good and the fire in the town half an hour away that has been going since the weekend is back under control but theres still smoke in the air.

I’m interested to know how much council rates are in other countries, how much are your rates?

Off to Bunnings!

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Our house gets quite hot in summer, most days over the last few weeks its hits 30C inside. We have air conditioning but use it as little as possible due to the cost. We use fans till it hits 28 and then use the air conditioning for a few hours in the evenings.

We’ve been looking into putting blinds/awnings on the outside of the windows so yesterday we headed off to Bunnings – a regular weekend pastime in Aus! (Though I can’t buy a sausage sandwich unfortunately) Our windows are all big – one is 3 metres. I had $800 budgeted and for that we bought an awning to go over the 3 m window and four outdoor blinds for some of the 1.8 m windows. They have 5 year warranties & should cut the UV light by 90%. That should bring the heat down.

We will eventually do all the windows and put ceiling fans in as well.

Rockstar Finance is having a “blog off” where you read two bloggers posts and vote for the best one. Round 1 is up now if you’d like to check it out:

Rockstar Rumble Round One