Cleaning Costs are Adding Up

Personally use Johnsons paints . I am not a great fan of painting a whole house white , so go with matt magnolia and have started painting skirting boards magnolia to save on cutting in time and personally I think it looks better than the traditional white skirting and there are no issues with the white paint going off colour ( mind you I think that only happens for oil based gloss paints ) . I am toying with the idea of magnolia doors maybe that will be one step too far !

I can't imagine magnolia skirting boards Paul, my gut feel is that it would look aweful, have you got any pics you can email to me please? I've been thinking about using plastics or even alloy skirting with built in heating systems. What do you think of that idea?

I guess decoration and appearance is subjective . Plastic skirting boards sound cheap looking and likely to chip and need replacing , wood is more robust to take the knocks of furniture and feet , alloy sounds expensive and not sure about colour matching but certainly creative . Can't attach photo but will email

My email address is mark@property118.com

Would you like me to upload the pics to a new page and create a link to them?

If only part of a carpet is damaged, eg by a triangular iron burn, or a big stain, and the damage is very noticeable are we justified in asking the tenant to pay for the whole carpet in that room? Sometimes I've put a rug over the damaged bit, but (depending on the position of damage) can't always do that. Should they pay?

I had a scenario very similar to that a few years ago. The tenant offered to pay the insurance excess so I called my insurance company. The chap that came out agreed that the carpet needed to be replaced but I couldn't match it to the rest of the house. I called the insurance assessor to tell him and he said "well that's no good, it has to match, we need to change your claim for new carpets throughout". My jaw hit the floor but who was I to complain? They paid up too and my insurance didn't go up the following year either. If only that company was still in the landlords insurance business 😉

I partly depends on how old a carpet is, if the carpet is only a few years old (and still looks new), I would expect the tenant to replace the whole carpet in the room. Hopefully there is a way to make the property look right without having to replace all the carpets!

If it is a large room when two rooms have been knocked together it may be possible to come up with a design that only need the carpet to be replaced in one half.

If the carpets are looking warn out, and you would have to replace them within the next year or two anyway, the tenant should not be expected to pay the complete cost. A landlord should not benefit from a tenant being force to pay for something that is a lot better then what was there already.

What can we do to reduce the risk of irons, they are one of the easiest ways for a reasonable person to damage a carpet.

You could always advise tenants to take out contents insurance of their own. Most of my tenants have nice TV's, laptops, jewelery etc so I advise them to get contents insurance. If they do, and there is an accident, they can claim of their own insurance - SIMPLES!

There is still the insurance excess – I don’t think it is reasonable to make a tenant pay this if the carpets would have been replaced anyway within a short time.

But I agree that tenants should take out insurance. (When we were renting it was hard to arrange insurance before we moved in, as the agent did not wish to find out the type of locks on all the doors and windows – the insurance company needed to know if the locks were to the British Standards.)

If I burned somebody's carpet or damaged anything for that matter, no matter how old, I would feel obliged to pay for it. I appreciate that not everybody feels that way so I always try to do everything by agreement, to try to understand the other persons point of view and come to an arrangement that both parties feel is fair and reasonable. The laws regarding deposit rotection exist to arbitrate where no agreement can be reached. Thankfully I've not had to go down that route yet so I must be doing something right, otherwise I've been lucky. I'll happily take more of either.