Bathroom Renovation Problems - grout removal

Following up the grout problem reported on 24 Nov, the owner has now applied a first treatment of Phosphoric Acid Substitute by Aqua Mix, with significant improvement. This first picture shows how the renovation company left the owner's patio.







This next picture shows the result of a single application of Phosphoric Acid Substitute followed by water wash.



The owner now intends to have the building cleaning firm mentioned earlier treat the whole patio, and this blog will keep you informed of the result.

Protecting our Kids

One of Ray White Beecroft's owners has had to modify his house to suit new regulations about protecting children from domestic falls. The requirement was to reduce the gaps between railings, and to raise the top of the railing. The result shows how such modifications can be done cheaply and attractively.

Also the steps from the patio were too high, so the owner had to rebuild them with three instead of just two steps.



These railings and steps were originally built fifteen years ago, and were approved back then, but a recent council inspection pointed out that the regulations have changed and the railings and steps didn't meet the new requirements.
If you are planning extensions or modifications to your house, you need to find out what the rules involve, obviously its best to build the railings right in the first place. The recent media attention to the 400 or so Australian children hurt last year falling out of windows is certainly going to increase attention paid to these regulations.

Auction Fever Easing?

Clearance rate of 68% last weekend ended a run of five consecutive months with rates over 70%.
Obviously the recent increases in mortgage rates would be partly responsible, along with the reduction in first home owner grants. Meanwhile Sydney's median house price is now a record $569,000 and climbing.

Big Rent Rises Forecast

BIS Shrapnel says Sydney rents are set to climb by 21% over the next three years. This is in part because of a significant drop in medium to high density residential dwelling construction, which this year reached the lowest level since 1987.
Another factor is the increase in home ownership caused by the first home owner grants, because each young person moving out from the family home into a new house reduces the stock of homes remaining available for renting.
Latest data from the NSW Department of Housing says rents rose 3.9% in the year to September, with the rise highest in the outer suburbs of Sydney.

Australian Houses are the biggest!

The Bureau of Statistics reports that the average size of new homes in australia is now 215 sqm, compared with 202 sqm in the United States and 196 sqm in New Zealand. In Britain the average is just 76 sqm!
Another interesting statistic is that the number of people living in each home has actually increased, only slightly (from 2.52 in 2007 to 2.56) but this is the first increase in a hundred years!

Bathroom Renovation Problems - grout removal

It seems that the grout problem referred to in an earlier blog just might have a solution. The company that did the renovations were not able to propose a way to remove the grout from the patio, so the owner did some research of his own. Found on the internet, groutmasters@aapt.net.au proposed a product Phosphoric Acid Substitute, and it looks as though that will shift the grout on the patio bricks. Now the owner is negotiating with a spray cleaning company to find out whether they can do a wide area clean instead of having to manually clean each brick in turn. This blog will keep you informed.

"House Prices to Rise Further" says RBA

In a speech that defended Australia's historically high house prices, the deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia told a housing conference to expect worse and to recognise that home buyers are getting value for money! He forecast that house prices will be boosted by increased population growth and immigration, solid increases in household incomes, and substantial competition for construction workers from the resurgent mining section.

Mirvac Group changes

Mirvac Real Estate Investment Trust will be taken over by parent Mirvac Group to avoid having to sell off prize assets at bargain basement prices. The chairman of MREIT told his shareholders that the trust was near to breaking bank covenants and needed a cash injection to survive.

Man of the House - couldn't resist this one.

A guy finished reading a new book entitled, "You Can Be THE Man of Your House."
He stormed to his wife in the kitchen and announced: "From now on, you need to know that I am the man of this house and my word is Law. You will prepare me a gourmet meal tonight, and when I'm done eating my meal, you will serve me a scrumptious dessert. After dinner, you are going to go upstairs with me and we will have the kind of sex that I want! Afterwards, you are going to draw me a bath so I can relax.You will wash my back and towel me dry and bring me my robe. Then, you will massage my feet and hands. Then tomorrow, guess who's going to dress me and comb my hair?"
The wife replied, "The funeral director would be my first guess."

Bathroom Renovation Problems = grout removal

When the grouters were working in the property we have been discussing (see blog Nov 15 and others), they set up their equipment on a tarpaulin on the patio. When they left, taking the tarpaulin with them, there was grout everywhere, except where the tarpaulin had been.
The owner complained, and nothing was done for about five weeks, then the grouting team returned and spent a couple of hours with a high pressure cleaner, which had no effect other than to spread the white gunk over the clear area where the tarpaulin had been.
The owner is still discussing this with Oxford Bathrooms, the company that did the renovations.

Be Careful What You Ask For

I noticed trees being chopped down in a house near mine, so walked over to find out what was going on. They said they had DA approval (I checked later with the Shire and they had). They asked if I wanted any of their tree clippings, as mulch for my garden. I was on my way to the gym, so said yes probably, intending to talk more when we came home. When we returned, they had gone, and this was on the house directly opposite. Obviously they thought this was where I lived!




We only have a very small garden!! I got our green wheelie bin and used it to transport the very small amount I needed. Then I sat back to see what the owner of the house would say.
Imagine my relief when he came home and saw the dump and said "oh yes super"!

Pay a Fee to Pay Your Rent

The NSW Tenants Union is urging people to challenge any convenience fees imposed by managing agents or landlords in relation to various methods of paying rents. It is common for tenants to be charged for using credit cards, 1.3% being fairly standard, which adds up to several hundred dollars over a year. Most tenants are happy to pay this for the convenience. The important thing is that the agency or landlord should not insist on this method of payment.
New regulations now in draft form will require agents to offer at least one way to pay rent free of charges.

House Building Booming?

AVJennings expects to return to profitability in this financial year. The company has 9825 lots under management, equivalent to five years supply, and a majority of these are under development of have development approved.

More Homes Needed for Sydney

The state government is forecasting a forty percent increase in Sydney population over the next 20 years. However much land they find, and however much they increase the permitted population density, there is no way house prices are going to fall if that is true!
Talking of which, auctions achieved a 68% success rate over Sydney last weekend, compared with 43% this time last year (during the crisis).

Home Deposit Rules

A Reserve Bank official has suggested the size of deposits home buyers must provide could be regulated, to prevent cash-fuelled house price bubbles. Apparently Singapore and Hong Kong are implementing tighter Loan-to-Valuatio (LVR) ratios. The official stressed that this is just a proposal. The LVRs have already tightened, from 100% to 90% recently. LVRs for first-home buyers are tighter.

Bathroom Renovation Problems - bad management

The owner of the property who had bathroom renovations done, mentioned earlier in this blog (eg Nov 17), complained about some mess left behind by one of the renovator's contractors. Their response? To tell the contractor they wouldn't pay him, and to give him the owner's mobile phone number! So next thing, the owner had a weeping contractor explaining in broken English that he wasn't going to get paid for the work he had done.
This pic is only a small part of the mess, taken a month after the work finished, but the question is, who is responsible for finishing a job properly? The individual sub-contractors involved, or the company that took the owner's money? An interesting exercise in ethics, acceptance of responsibility, passing the buck, and a few other business related issues.

RBA okays further interest rate rises

The Reserve Bank accepts that the "margins on variable rate housing lending relative to bank funding costs have declined over the past two years".

Bathroom Renovation Problems - rain shower height

How high should a rain shower be?


How about 5 ft 9.5 inches (175 cms)? So even the shortest person in the family had to crouch to get wet!

Oxford Bathrooms offered to rip all the tiles out, redo the plumbing, and start again, but the owners agreed to a compromise, mainly to get the job finished.

Bathroom Renovation Problems

We have obtained some excellent examples of how not to renovate bathrooms, and will be covering these in the next few issues of this blog.

Building Problems

Ray White Beecroft had an interesting Property Management problem the other day when a rental property was found to have a ceiling starting to collapse. Removing the gyprock exposed the joists that are meant to hold the walls of the house together, and guess what. The house is about 12 years old and the original owner-builder had used the wrong type of wood clamp, and had fitted the gyprock ceiling alinged the wrong way. The weight of the roof was forcing the walls apart, and the joists were not fastened in a manner sufficient to take the strain, so the joist clamps had started opening out, allowing the walls to move apart, as in this photograph.

We did a temporary repair until the end of the tenant's lease, then to fix the problem we had to remove all the ceiling gyprock panels, jack up the joists (and hence the roof) until the joists touched again, and use the correct clamps, then fit ceiling gyprock aligned along the joists to add stiffness.
Remarkably, we had new tenants signed up ready to move in before the repairs were finished.

RAMS making a come-back?

John Kinghorn, founder of RAMS Home Loans, recently announced that conditions are now ripe to start challenging the big banks again. RAMS was forced to sell out to Westpac two years ago, but the listed entity RHG remaining from RAMS still trades and made $120 million last financial year out of morgages it retained after selling out to Westpac.
In describing his intentions, Mr Kinghorn said his shareholders might be invited to back a bid to re-enter the home loan market.
I think there would be much support for a return of the smaller lenders, to keep commercial pressure on the big banks. There seems to have been a fundamental difference between Australia and the United States. In America, small lenders went totally stupid and lent to anyone who would sign a contract, irrespective of the prospect of the loan ever being serviced. They could do this because the banks bought those dodgy debts, packaging and bundling them in ways that made it impossibe for anyone to value the resultant financial packages. And hence the global financial crisis, along with a huge crash in American house prices!
There seems to be no evidence of a similar crazy house sale lending splurge in Australia, and although there have been many mortgagee sales over the last year, many of those forced sales were due to other loans going bad, especially margin stockmarket loans. Real estate agencies have seen some houses sold for knock down prices, but in general house prices survived the crash and are now climbing again. So, welcome back, RAMS, or whatever the new entities might be called.

Interest Rates up 0.25%

At 2:30 the Reserve Bank announced a 0.25% rate increase in the cash rate to 3.5%. (this was posted at 2:33 EST, blogspot time is USA time!)

Brush Turkeys Invading Sydney

Brush turkeys were virtually driven out of Sydney during the depression because their meat, while tough, was better than nothing. They didn't return even after being made a protected species, probably because they don't like English style gardens. Now, with increasing numbers of Native Australian Bush gardens, the turkeys are making a comeback.
I have seen several of these large birds in Beecroft recently. Before deciding how to respond if a bush turkey starts digging up your backyard, please remember that they are a protected species. One minor way to discourage them is not to leave pet food accessible to them.

Investors Bracing

My Friday post may have been optimistic, as were the share traders who prompted the post by responding so enthusiastically to the US Treasury figures. While we slept on Friday night, America was backtracking strongly! While the US Treasury figures were certainly very good news, there is still much sentiment that the rally in shares has gone too far too fast, and it looks like a strong correction is now taking place.
George Soros is quoted as saying the global economy is liable to run out of steam in 2010/11, possibly sparking a double dip recession.

Home Insulation

Over the weekend the NSW government cut the home insulation installation grant from $1600 to $1200! It is not clear where this leaves people with existing contracts that are signed but not completed. Where the quoted installation cost was more than $1600, someone is going to have to make up the extra.
Ray White Beecroft's property management department has been actively promoting this government initiative to its many landlords, and currently has some 20 landlords either already installed or negotiating with installers. It will be interesting to see how the installation companies respond to the instant cut in their grant.