I'm Putting My Tiny House on Airbnb

Hey everyone, hope you're having a good day. So it's been a little while since I've done any update videos on the new house that I bought with my brother and I don't think I've done any videos where I've spoken about what my plans are for my tiny home so I thought I'd kill two birds with one video and update you on all of that and show you what I've been up to. So first of all, the new house that I bought with my brother, things have slowed down with that much more than I thought they would. First of all it was just because it was Christmas and everyone was off so here's some Christmas themed content but beyond that we found out that we actually need planning permission and building warrants to do the work that we want to do on this house. Naively I'd assumed that because it's at the back of the house that you could kind of take like a mullet approach to planning permission. I thought as long as the front of the house is all good and you know you're not doing anything untoward there you can do whatever you want, have a party at the back. Unfortunately the local council don't take that same mullet approach to building standards so I had to get my friend who's a senior architect, he's called John, I got him involved and he's going to make sure everything's above board and kosher so it'll be a couple of months before we get back to things and if you want to hire an architect in Scotland, renovate a castle, I'll drop John's links down below. Now coming back to my house, the plan there is to put it on Airbnb and that's involved me kind of just going round my house and figuring out things I can do to make it a bit nicer for guests and also going through the short term letting licence application which is what you need in Scotland these days if you want to rent your house out as a holiday home so I'll speak more about that in a second. But in terms of just kind of making my place better I was just looking at things that could be improved like in the bedroom the blinds let in a lot of light, that was actually by decision of me, what a weird way to say that, I had chosen to do that because I quite like getting woken up by sunlight but I think it kind of affects your sleep so I'm going to try and put in blackout blinds and hopefully that'll be much better, it'll be better for guests as well especially in the summer when the sun comes up at like 4am in Scotland which is crazy. So beyond that as part of this whole short term letting licence thing I needed to get a bunch of firefighting equipment just because you never know who is going to be a pyromaniac, I actually used to be a bit of a pyromaniac growing up, there was nothing more exciting than playing with matches but thankfully I've grown out of that and on top of that you also need all of your equipment checked in the house, I'm not speaking of like a prostate exam, you need to get all of your electrics checked and then they get given a little pass indication thing if they're up to standard so that was another thing that I had to go through, that's what that was all about. And beyond that I'm just kind of trying to figure out what could look nicer, right there I showed you the little bookshelf that I had before, that kind of ended up not being that good just because the books kind of trapped air behind there and I found that it ended up causing a bit of humidity and it almost seemed like the starting of damp, it kind of got a little bit dirty. So instead of that I decided to put a little bit of potpourri and take down all of my birthday cards, I turned 29 on the 27th of December which is despicable, but yeah I took the birthday cards down, took the books away and replaced it with just some potpourri and this battery just wouldn't go in and I was like jumping around and some little lights just to give it a bit of a warm glow. I might sort of try and improve it a little bit more, spend a little bit more money and time figuring out how to decorate that area a bit nicer but I think the addition of potpourri and a little reed diffuser to give a nicer smell for the place, not that it smells bad just you know a nice smell, is always a welcome addition and I think it actually looked quite good when I popped the little button lights in there. You can stick them to the sides but I think I'm going to repaint these little alcove spaces but it turned out quite cosy I think, let me know what you think and let me know what else I should put in there, I'm not obviously going to keep the candles in there because that's a fire hazard and on top of that the biggest thing that I needed to change about this house was the stairs. The stairs were a death trap so I bought on recommendation of some of my viewers because I'd mentioned this in the past that a few months ago I fell down my stairs, I slipped down the stairs and cracked my ass on the edge of one of the steps which was most painful. A lot of people recommended getting these see-through stair sticker gripper things, that's not the official name and I didn't do a great job of putting them down, I'll probably have to redo some of them but I figured out after the first couple that it was better to apply it with the little roller rather than just sticking the whole length of the thing down and then putting the roller over it. So a couple of the steps have some air bubbles but I've noticed such a difference and I've noticed that I was always bracing myself to not slip going down the stairs. Now that I have these I'm just walking down the stairs normally but in the past when it was uncovered it was always really slippy and I didn't want anyone to, you know, die on my staircase. I thought that would be a bit of an anti-climax. So sorted them out, put down these stair grippers. It was either this, putting carpet down which I didn't think would be very good or leaving it uncovered and uncovered just wasn't a good option. So you can kind of see the little gripper bits in some light but right now you can't really see it. Like there when you're looking down the stairs or up close you have to look quite hard in certain lights to see it but I think just ultimately it's better to have it look a little bit less good and have everyone be safe and I think that's the most important thing. Now in terms of actually running the Airbnb I won't be doing it myself just because I don't think I have enough time to commit to it and make a good job of it. So I decided that I wanted to hire that side of things out and rather than hire it out to like a strange company I decided to ask my mum who is now retired and has been looking for like a little side job or way of making money on the side if she would be interested in doing it. So thankfully she agreed and the way that it'll work is I'll just take some money to cover the mortgage and expenses and then she'll take money for her salary and wage. So it's kind of like mutually beneficial. Hopefully that doesn't make me sound too lazy or entitled I just think it sort of serves both parties quite well so hopefully that doesn't make me sound like an awful person. Shesha has previous experience running a holiday home as well. After my gran died like 12 or 13 years ago my mum and dad decided that well since my gran wouldn't be using her house anymore they could renovate it and turn it into a holiday home so that's what they did. They got a lot of bookings, it did well but because of how far away the holiday home was it was like two hours away they couldn't be like on site like on hand to deal with guests or do changeovers or anything like that so they had to hire out a lot of the work and that ate up like the profits and it was also kind of stressful having to run something so far away. So this is a much better situation and my mum can apply all of the wisdom she got from running that previous one and apply it to this so hopefully that sounds okay. But that's the update with everything, I've got some interesting videos coming up soon so if you're interested in seeing them leave a like and subscribe. Thanks for watching and I'll catch you all in the next one.