Keeping up appearances.......

HappyNow

Thanks for the support Granny, Brizzle and Honey Bear .

Our tenant's family returned the keys on Saturday. They left it beautifully clean and tidy, but it is looking shabby and worn and if we want to attract another excellent tenant we have to invest in it. So:

• Hob and oven replaced at £229
• Decorating throughout underway (£90 and counting!)
• Carpet company giving estimate tomorrow for the full house carpeting, and provisionally booked for fitting next Tuesday. I bet it's around £900
• All curtains taken down and washed - they still look good

That's an awful lot of money (roughly three months rent) but essential if we want to attract a good tenant quickly. We are losing £450 monthly while it stands empty so we've GOT to make people want to live there - there are several similar ones on the market at the moment so ours has to be the most attractive, which it will be. Mr Happy and I have both taken the week off work to get it sorted and it will be advertised by the end of this week, viewable from Tuesday. Hard work this landlady-ing stuff!

brizzledfw

Best of luck Happy. It is a lot of money to spend but as you say you need tenants and a lot of people may not want to move in before Xmas so you need to make an impact ...At least the curtains are OK!

grannyx2

Good luck with getting a new fantastic reliable tenant

Granny x

kerri_dfw

Fingers crossed for a good tenant and really sorry to hear about the old tenant :(x

pennywisepoundstupid

Terrible news about your old tenant, so very sad.

I'm sure you will get the place rented out quickly with all the work you are doing.

Boomfloom

I wish you were my landlord, Mrs Happy. The last time our place was decorated was sometime in the 80s so shabby doesn't even cover it - we have all the period features of artex and woodchip wallpaper. Everything is falling apart and nothing will get done.

You deserve only the best things to come your way. Good luck with finding new tenants.

Honey_Bear

With all the effort you're putting into making the property attractive, you'll soon be back on track.

HappyNow

Thanks for all the positive thoughts ladies . They worked a treat - the house has been let today to the first person to view it!

We were there decorating at the weekend when there was a knock at the door from a lady who had seen the To Let sign. It looked a bomb-sight (you know, that 'darkest before the dawn' moment ) but we let her look round anyway. She liked it and arranged with the lettings agent to view it properly this morning, when it was all cleaned, decorated and newly carpeted. It looks gorgeous and she fell in love with it and she and her beautiful little daughter move in on Saturday! She is young but sensible, and her dad was with her and seems very supportive. I have a feeling she will be an excellent tenant. So although it has cost us around £1400 we have only lost two weeks rent which is amazing considering the work we've done, especially as we thought we might struggle to let it with Christmas approaching.

Unfortunately we did not have £1400 in our emergency funds. I managed to scrape together £700 but the rest is going back onto our debt. That makes me very sad, but it's not something I could have avoided and the rental house IS an investment for the future. By spending the money we have attracted a tenant who will, in effect, pay the mortgage for us in return for having a lovely home to live in. It's a win-win really, but I am dreading payday next Friday when the cold, hard new figures are in .

grannyx2

Great news re tenant, hopefully things won't be as bleak as you fear on pay day

Granny x

armchairexpert

HappyNow, apologies for jumping in, but I have been reading your whole diary over the past few days, and I can't see that this is brought up anywhere...did you say that your rental property is owned outright? And you have a mortgage on your own property?

Do you claim back any of the interest on that mortgage? I am not a tax lawyer, and I hope you had good advice when you took out that mortgage, but my understanding is that expenditure incurred in maintaining a rental property is tax deductible, and that includes interest on the mortgage. Now, if you took out a mortgage against your first property in order to buy your second one, that might count as tax deductible, because the test is not how your loans are structured, but the purpose of the loan - so if your mortgage was taken out for the purpose of buying an investment, it doesn't necessarily matter where the loan is located. But PLEASE check this with an accountant if you haven't already. It seems to me that you might be paying a lot more debt than you need to, if you have a mortgage against your PPOR and not your investment property and aren't claiming the interest.