Alister Christie’s Blog

My partner (Jackie) and I were out for a drive a few weekends ago and for some reason or other we went on a detour.  We saw a for sale sign on a property, we rang the real estate agent but the details didn’t get us excited, so we carried on and found another.  This one was more interesting and the agent was not far from the property so he met us there.  The place was filthy - basically you had to wade through rat droppings and the amount of mould the walls and windows had accumulated was impressive - this is the kind of property Jackie & I get excited about (we’re investors, what can I say).

We put in an offer of $191k (it was on the market for $235k [overpriced] & the GV was $265), however it transpired that other people were putting in offers so we upped ours to $201k and we ended up getting it.

There is a bit of work to be done to the property and we’ll probably end up spending about $15k on it make it habitable.  We’ve already cleaned it, started painting, cleared the section, replaced the window sills and the plumber is in the process of ripping out the old plumbing and replacing it - hopefully it will be ready for rent in a couple of weeks.

Since buying this one, we’ve purchased 3 more (although we don’t “own” these as yet) - it’s been a busy couple of weeks.  I don’t think we’ll be buying anything else for awhile.

Here we take a look at assembling one of the polyhedra templates available here.  In this video I assemble a truncated icosahedron (a soccer ball) out of paper.  I’ve sped things up by a factor of 10x, which makes the video considerably shorter and more interesting to watch.

Download the templates, cut them out, glue them up and admire your creation.  The instructions are simple, cut the solid lines, fold the dotted lines and glue the tabs.  The PDF contains all the regular and semi-regular polyhedra - 19 designs in total.  Download the Templates here.  To save the file you might need to right click on the link and select Save As.  I designed these templates using Corel Draw (it came free with my now dead scanner) in 1998.