A perfect(ly timed) storm made reno possible

Something that has always stuck in my mind was a comment my father made when I was a teenager, “Property is always a good investment”.

He proved this in 1978, when he used the money from the sale of his deceased mother’s house, along with an interest-only loan, to buy four one-bedroom units in Parramatta, all of which now have been well and truly paid off. He now lives in his retirement off the rent earned from each of them. The units cost him $9,000 each back in 1978, and today they are each worth about $250,000 each.

Knowing how important it was to buy into property, in 2001 he sold one of the units and gave each of his children and step-children some money to use as a deposit on our own houses. The unit sold for $145,000 and this was shared evenly between the seven of us, so we received just over $20,000 each.

Back in 2001, house prices were still quite low, so this provided us with a serious leg up. It was good timing, because it was only a year later that Sydney prices went through the roof!

I was in what I believed to be a solid relationship with my partner, after having been previously married to the father of my two children. That marriage had ended with nothing to show for it, as my first husband was unable to save money and spent everything we ever had on things like camping gear and video cameras.

After the divorce I stayed in the house that we were renting and he moved to south of Sydney. My new partner had a good income and I was also working, so we were able to use the money gifted to us from my father and buy a house in the same suburb that I was renting in – Greystanes in Sydney’s west. We were very fortunate as we purchased at the end of 2001, just before house prices skyrocketed.

We bought a brick four-bedroom house with a family room for only $300,000. Within months of settling, prices for a house of similar type in our area were well over the $400,000 mark. I have to admit, though, it wasn’t all smooth sailing at first. We were so happy to have the place and we set about doing some basic fixing up to it to make it more comfortable. The previous owners had the strangest taste in paint colour and had used really dark colours like blue, red, pink and yellow, with a different colour in every room.

They were also smokers, so the carpets and blinds were ruined and we had to hire professional commercial cleaners to clean all of the walls before we could even consider painting. Even after that, we still had issues getting the nicotine to stop coming through the ceiling paint.

We pulled up the carpet and sanded the floors ourselves and put in new blinds and my partner set about turning the two little bedrooms at the back of the house into one room to be used as a guest room/study.

After four weeks of renovation and another four weeks of living in our home, a massive storm struck Sydney. It devastated our suburb and unfortunately (or fortunately) the neighbours’ massive 10-metre gum tree toppled over straight over the family room of our home and it was a write-off. We couldn’t believe it. Thank goodness for building insurance!

I think I can now pay building insurance for the rest of my life and still not come close to paying what we ending up having replaced. That tree crashing through our home ended up being the best thing that could possibly happen, as the insurance payout covered the replacement of the entire back room. We had a great builder who had some fantastic ideas and used the money from the insurance company to do as much as possible.

We ended up with a beautiful, modern back room with high ceilings and down lights, a proper guest room, massive decking all around the back and gorgeous doors that created a huge indoor/outdoor living area. The building took ages and I was without a kitchen for nine months. I can laugh now, but it wasn’t funny at the time.

One of the rooms we were planning on renovating was the kitchen. Because of the tree disaster, we had to put the kitchen on hold and we were very lucky that the lovely kitchen supplier held onto our new kitchen for all that time until we were ready for it. I was great at doing BBQ meals and using the electric frypan for everything in the meantime!

The newly renovated house was now considerably more valuable than when we had purchased only one year earlier.