In need of a 60-minute makeover

Now that we've cleared all the dead/unwanted trees off the property and fixed up the bits of the house that weren't working, what's next?

• Take up the City West Water offer and upgrade single flush toilet suites to dual flush 4-star ones.
• Admit we're not ready to spend weekends mowing lawns and trimming bushes and just hire a gardener.
• Resurface the bathrooms and bring them into the 21st century without a lot of hacking and within reasonable budget.
  

Backyard Blitz Begins

It's gonna be a fun day.

Out front, the road crew that's upgrading Johnson Ave is hard at work. Sometimes they turn up, sometimes they don't. But today they're at it full force.

Hope the road will be clear at school pick-up time. Yesterday they closed the left turn in the morning and the right turn in the afternoon, so I had to back out via the Barber Rd exit and come back in by the vet's.

Back of the house, the crew from Jim's Trees is about to take down ten of our trees as contracted.

It's already 1.15 pm. They said they were coming at lunchtime and I forgot to ask what that meant. We'll see if they can keep it under 2 hours as promised before I have to dash out for the school run.

The two guys that came (one angmoh, one Indian) are very polite. I was asked if I could remove my car from the driveway so they could reverse their truck in (a really long one with trailer attached) without scratching my car. They'll be working from the pergola out to the backyard.

The drilling sounds have begun. I've kept Scottie indoors so he won't jump on the tradies. But he is so not liking the noise.

A couple of weekends ago, we were at Allans Music on Bourke St checking out the pianos.

I was down to the Kawai uprights (K6, K8, K35) while hubby had his eye on the baby grand.

The reason we visited was because of Allans' publicity email about their massive EOFY sale. Take 10% off RRP then another 5% off the discounted price etc. So we went in expectation of crazy ridiculous prices that might just put a Kawai within our reach finally.

When we got home, I checked around online and discovered that one retailer has all along been selling Kawai pianos at the marked-down price that Allans is trumpeting.

Minus the fuss.

Today I got another email from Allans, announcing a "EOFY stocktake clearance" because "Kawai Japan has shipped a warehouse load of fresh new pianos to Kawai Australia with the instruction to sell!" (exclamation mark theirs)

If you go to the Austral Piano World website, you'll see their pianos are marked "Don't pay $xx. Our price $yy".

A quick comparison -

Example:
K35 upright
Allans: "Now only A$8,595"
APW: "Don't Pay: $10995.00 Our Price: $8595.00"

Example:
RX2 Grand
Allans: "Now only A$24,995"
APW: "Don't Pay: $34995.00 Our Price: $24495.00" (That's $500 less than Allans, and it's not even a sale.)

In all the months I've been researching, I have yet to see a sale announcement of any kind by APW. With no mark-ups to start with, I guess there's really no need to mark down.

My best friend sent me a link to this video. Is this muso awesome or what!

The valuation is out.

The good news: our PPOR has increased in value by almost 39% since we bought it.

The not-so-good news: the valuation came in at $5k less than the mortgage broker's assumption, which means the amount of equity we have access to is $4k less than projected.

Which narrows our choice of potential IPs.

Which, in the scheme of things, is not necessarily a bad thing.

It just means being smarter with our resources and more picky about what we choose to buy.