My March Challenge
On my schedule of things to do I am supposed to be focusing on renting out more of our garage this month. I still haven’t managed to rent out my car or sell on car advertising and I would like to rent out my house for a week over the Easter holidays.
Luckily for me I don’t actually have to work very hard to rent out some more storage space because a friend asked me if I would store some of her stuff in a few weeks time- result! I would like to rent out more space, but if I want to rent out my house over Easter I have work to do and I am going to focus on that for the next while.
I have taken the first step and listed my house on Airbnb and advertised it to my Facebook friends. I’m not entirely convinced we will manage to rent it out over Easter as there isn’t long to go and I haven’t had any interest so far. However if I hadn’t set myself the goal of trying to rent it out over Easter, I would have most likely waited until much nearer the summer to get the house ready and advertise it on Airbnb for the couple of weeks we want to rent it out in the summer holidays and actually that probably would have been too late. So my theory is that whether or not we rent it out over Easter it is still worth getting the house and listing ready now for the next time I want to rent it out. Plus you never know we may be lucky and get a booking for Easter.
The one upsetting thing is that we were supposed to have a student arrive the day our current student leaves, but they were meant to be with us for 4 weeks and the 4th week is in the Easter holidays. I said we could only have the student for 3 weeks and so they cancelled the whole booking :(. We now have no students lined up after our current one goes, so I am going to try other agencies and listing the room on Airbnb.
Anyway I said I have work to do and this is mainly doing a bit of redecoration and repair work. We basically redecorated the house from top to bottom around 5 years ago and it mostly looks pretty good. The kids bedrooms however have (had) a bit of a mishmash of random pictures and posters on the walls and one of them could do with a repaint. There are also places around the house that could do with touching up/ cleaning the paintwork. After redecorating we never quite got around to co-ordinating the curtains, bedding, pictures and light fittings in our bedroom and it would be nice to co-ordinate it a bit better. Our lounge could also do with a very simple makeover (the paintwork is fine, it is just the pictures, cushions and tv cabinet that need a bit of work).
I have already sorted out YS’s (Younger Son’s) room. The decor in his room was quite bland and minimal and hadn’t been updated since his baby days. I decided it needed a bit more character. I found some gorgeous animal jungle print curtains in a charity shop for £5 (as pictured at the top of this post) and decided to go with an animal theme in the room. This involved sweet talking OS (Older Son) into giving his brother some of the pictures and things from his room. This included a framed jungle scene print, an owl clock and a giraffe hanging height measurer. I found a framed picture of elephants that had been in the loft for years and I bought a lovely animal print notice board in a charity shop for £3. The curtains were the perfect size, but they didn’t have black out curtains behind them. The old curtains had black out lining sewn into them and to save on hassle and money I basically hooked the two sets of curtains together so that one set hangs behind the other. My mum came and helped and we both tacked the curtains together with slip stitch so that you can’t tell there are two sets of curtains hanging together. I love it and YS seems pretty happy with it too.
I also found some really lovely curtains for our bedroom in a charity shop at a cost of £18 – they are really good quality, large curtains, so I think that they were great value. The only problem is that they stink of one of those room freshener things and I am trying to air them as much as possible to get rid of the smell. Plus they also need lining with black out lining.
Next on my list is OS’s room though, before he starts getting upset that we haven’t done anything to his room after giving half his stuff to his brother. We are going with a pirate/ nautical/ fish and sea creature theme in his room. I don’t have anything that fits that theme, so I am going to get making (plus I will keep scouring the charity shops)! Next week though is a really busy week. I am meeting up with a couple of girls from Sussex University who want to make a documentary about my money making adventures for their masters degree and another day next week I am hopefully meeting up with Benita Matofska who apparently saved herself £20,000 through sharing! If I get any free time though I will see what I can do for OS’s room…
