Simple and Sustainable Forums: RumpledElf - Viewing Profile - Simple and Sustainable Forums

The comments are interesting, vast majority are people who have houses worth less than they paid for them, with a sprinkling of spruiking comments about how good the housing market is and how every auction is selling easily for over reserve.
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SIL had a little house in a suburb full of little houses - one of those suburbs that used to be full of ugly little timber framed houses on huge blocks that are getting knocked down by the dozen and replaced with 3 small houses per block. They're all the same in that suburb, modern 3x2's with tiny yards. Must make valuer's lives easy.

Anyway, a few years back the MIL proudly told us they wanted to top up their loan and they didn't get the valuation they wanted so they got the valuer to come in and do a walk through and they got a valuation of $485k. Yay!

House sold last month for $485k. They upgraded to a house for $620k (remember, this is Adelaide we're talking about) to get into a different school catchment. Big improvement on value in a few years right there, eh? $485k to $485k!

Not exactly a prime example of getting ahead, selling a house a few years after a valuation based topup (assuming to max), subtract interest, stamp duty on the new house, agent selling fees and various renovations and improvements (eg, their yard was completely planted out with fairly mature landscaping plants = expensive).

Would have been better off building a house in the right catchment to start with ....

We have a new house so it came with one of those horrible deserts of clay out back - it was lovely rich topsoil before they churned it up to put in all the plumbing.

Anyway, we put in a crop of broad beans which have just started flowering so those have been duly hacked down into green manure, and now its back to a desert again.

Was at the hardware store looking for Clonex (one of the kids emptied my bottle ... NOT happy, the stuff is hard to find) and ended up running into all the lawn products, one of which was for 'kidney grass' or Dichondra Repens. Thought it looked familiar, the stuff keeps coming up in my strawberry patch and I've been relocating it into pots because I think it looks cute. So I've decided to plant out the shadiest patch of horrid desert with the stuff and see how it goes.

Its actually a native and is growing in possibly the worst place in the yard already so I don't anticipate any issues with it but I suspect it might be a bit patchy. All I've been doing regarding lawn at the moment is just letting the non-prickly clovers go (and pulling up the prickly ones), and have tossed in some red clover seeds too off ebay. They're not liking the really hard clay much though.

So why not a conventional lawn? Mowing. We're lazy