Exterior Painted Gives Morale Boost

After so many months the house is at least starting to look almost finished. We got a Pink Bin in last week and piled it full of the building rubbish; the lights are wired and most of them seem to work. Having finished the wiring, we were able to finish the insulation in the ceiling.

This photo shows the house with only it's first coat of paint complete. The WC (water closet) has got it's first coat on also and the wardrobes in the main bedroom have been bogged and undercoated.

We advertised the exterior painting job on Builderscrack but in the end gave the job to a painter who was working on the house next door. He has swooped in with 2 helpers and in one week, sanded, bogged and painted to this stage. They've been very fast.

There's still a lot of fiddly building inside to complete, like building a door frame to give the third bedroom a new door, finishing scotia replacement and ceiling batons, figuring out where to put the dishwasher.

Once the new laundry has been painted, the vinyl layers will come in and do their thing and soon, very soon, one room will be completely finished.

The struggle for us is to drag ourselves their after work and spend more time there on weekends - we've just not been very good at doing that. It's hard to put a date on when we'll be finished because of our being almost burnt out energy and motivation-wise. Looks like we will not get the house rented before the end of the financial year, which means no tax return can be filed and nothing we've spent on it can be claimed back as tax deductible. Capital expenditure, which most of it has been, could not have been claimed anyway.

The overdraft is mounting and we're over budget on the renovations (which we'd only set at $40,000). Friends of ours recently had their bathroom redone and that cost $18,000, so our measly budget of $40,000 was unrealistic to start with. Still, we're sliding fast towards a total spend that may very well exceed the registered valuation we'll get as soon as we're done.

Has it been a good investment? We're yet to calculate that. One advantage of this project is that it's sucked up every spare cent we've earned over the last 8 months. We sold our other house and got rid of the mortgage, which has saved us money. We've learnt that we can rent a house in a nicer area than where we could afford to buy, and hence are enjoying a nicer safer lifestyle. At the end of the project we will have only a small mortgage and great borrowing power, so we'll be able to borrow and buy another rental property straight away. So, whilst we've invested everything in developing this one rental property - actually it will result in us owning 2 rental properties. Sounds unbelievable even to us. Stay posted to see if we can pull it off.