efinitely selling

I’ve had it straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak - the owners of apartment 20 are selling. Jo and the Router Boy moved out in short order at the end of last month. Jo had no sooner told me they were leaving than the packing boxes appeared and they were packed and left by the end of the same week.

Today the owner turned up to make a start on the tarting up process before the proposed sale by auction next month. Mr B. is an owner/investor and told me he bought the apartment 25 years ago when they first married. Twenty five years ago is a long time but I wracked my brains and remembered it had previously been owned by another investor, an Irishman. Mr B considers it has been a great investment.

Mr B has a 17 year old son who has been recently diagnosed with cancer and before this happened they had decided to realise some of their assets and move into some posh place in one of Melbourne’s more salubrious suburbs. Now they are just want the best outcome possible for their boy and the property will get a quick smarten up and be put on the market as soon as possible. Quite understandable.

It is a reasonable apartment, top floor which makes it a sauna in the summer and I have to say in the past Mr B has not been too ready to part with money when it came to doing much needed work on this unit. I listened with interest as he told me how he had never charged exorbitant rent to any of his tenants. I just stood there and kept my thoughts to myself; thoughts about the girls who lived there for two years without a working oven in the kitchen and the endless plumbing problems in the bathroom which he managed to do next to nothing about leaving those girls and Jo and the Router Boy to live with a pool of water on the floor around the hand-basin. Charming.

Oh well, in spite of all Mr B’s apparently grandiose plans for improvements the buyer of this property will soon find that he has spent as little as possible and most of that expenditure will be purely cosmetic.

Good old Mr B…

venings Cooler

Here we are in the season we know as spring and this past week we have had some of the coldest nights since winter arrived three months back.

I have had to get out the doona and fill the hot water bottles this week. I know, I live in the dark ages, well maybe not the dark ages I do have electricity at the Trash Palace, but I haven’t used an electric blanket for maybe two years now.

I was beginning to think we would not have any seriously cold nights this year but I was wrong. Again.