Opinions please

Consult your agent as to whether the market warrants the spend. If you're doing just one thing, paint is better value. We spent ages cleaning marks off walls when we sold our last house and would have been better off just paying someone to paint the whole house (faster sale=more money). Re carpet, many people want floorboards or tiles now, therefore not worth replacing. Our current house was bought for a good price in a hot market, partly because the carpet had dog smell and some feature wall colours put off many people. We replaced with floating bamboo floorboards and painted the whole house off-white before moving in. Instant transformation.

Hey Nik. Our current garage is 6.5mx6.5m and its great I can fit on each side some peg board and cabiners and at the back of garage, can store some bikes. But its tight - and we also dont have the space for a shed at the back. I currently store power tools, whipper/snipper/mower in the garage. Having approx 8x8m would be a huge upgrade for current things I store, and allow me to put battery storage in future and have a good workbench and workspace area. I did think about a shed at the back - will be much cheaper. But I would have to provision for a concrete slab, adequate power and would have to insulate it if it was to be my man-cave! I wonder how much adding 1.5m to the garage would cost compared to putting a quality shed in with utilities etc!?

siri - re boundary construction it of course depends upon the specific context - the issue in this case is the site fall and being on the high side there could be potential issues of building heights from the NGL on the neighbour's side....my comment was also in respect to considering a terrace structure above a close to boundary structure and complexity that would be thrown up with screening and structural offsets etc.....and this is sometimes worth pursuing where space is tight, however I'm anticipating here there is a fair bit of room to move and I'm guessing (an educated guess based on limited contextual information provided ) that a more cost effective/simpler option on a number of levels will be to (a) keep things off the northern boundary and (b) minimise renovation scope and consider a strategic rear extension that focuses on master bedroom zone and cleaning up the main living zone - if the majority of the existing spaces are retain structurally and limit renovation to cosmetic upgrades then the budget will stretch a lot further but net result is a more valuable property - and a more cost-effective value adding proposal that on paper is more likely to be accepted for finance.........this is always a integrated numbers game/exercise We're working on a job at the moment that we crunched numbers on various options & scope/configurations, but the two "shortlisted" of them were very similar - one slightly more expanded and pushing out to boundaries, the other more tightly disciplined, simpler and deliberately keeping building extension off boundaries. Whilst both of the shortlisted proposals essentially accommodated/covered the client's requirements outcomes, we estimated approx $100K accumulative difference one way or the other........