Thursday 7 May 2015

Slow progress with the 'Lake house' renovations and extension

The prefab house on the 25-acre hobby farm at Lake Wallis my parents transferred to me early last year had become very run-down during the ten years one of my sisters was living there (rent free) and supposedly looking after my parent's herd of alpacas... in reality she appears to have spent most of her time collecting and hoarding junk, which my parents are now in the process of slowly clearing out and either taking to the local tip (at a cost of about $85 per trailer load) or packing up to transport to their larger farm at Inverell (where my sister and the alpacas herd had moved to at the start of last year). Once all the junk has finally been cleared out the old carpet will be removed and the house fumigated before being renovated (new lino floors and patched and repainted walls). My plan is to then submit a DA (development application) to the local council to have a two-storey extension added to the rear of the existing house, so that there will be enough room for us to stay at the farm with my parents during school holidays.

My parents plan on eventually buying my sister a small farm for he to live on, using some of the proceeds from selling off their Inverell farm, and to down-size by moving back to the Lake Wallis farm to live. The balance of the proceeds of the sale of their Inverell farm should help self-fund their retirement for the next few years (they get a small UK pension due to the years my father was in the RAF before moving to Australia in the early 60s, and recently also a small amount of Australian aged-pension, having now spent most of the superannuation my father received when he retired as an airline pilot in the early 1990s). In another few more years time the value of the Lake Wallis farm they gifted to me will no longer be counted in the pension 'assets test', so my parents should then be eligible for a slightly larger Australia pension income to live off. As I am now paying the rates, insurance and maintenance costs for the Lake Wallis house their living costs should be fairly modest by then (provided they are no longer paying for any of my sister's living expenses!). I also plan on moving to Lake Wallis myself when I retire in ten or fifteen years time (unless I get retrenched beforehand), but I doubt my parents will still be living there as my father would be pushing 100 by then (although it is possible, as his Aunt will be celebrating her 100th birthday in a few months' time).

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