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Rapid Reno Expert, Naomi Findlay, is in L.A and is touring us around the apartment where she’s staying for a renovation case study. Watch and learn.

Hi everyone! It’s Naomi Findlay here, Australia’s Rapid Renovation Expert. I’m back with another month of success tips.

I’m actually in L.A. at the moment in an Airbnb apartment, and what I want to talk to you about is how much you can learn from being really observant with the spaces you are in. I’m actually taking you into the bedroom that I’m staying but also into the bathroom that I’m staying in.

So I was looking in this bathroom last night and I was thinking about how many things I can take positive and maybe some improvements need to have about these spaces that I’m in.

So I want to share some of this with you today because as a renovator and as the one who wants to create wealth around renovating, I am constantly learning. There are so many ways to do things and there are so many other mistakes that people do and the people create that you can actually learn from. We are not going to critic this bathroom as such but we are going to look at a few things we can learn from.

The first thing I want to show you is this bathtub space.

It has a micro bathtub at the bottom and it has what it looks like tiles but they’re actually like a pre-formed PVC. So this entire unit here is modular. The lesson that I take from that is with a massive cement-rendered cavitied building, there obviously needs to be a substantial planning in place for them to be able to just slot in a pre-fab, pre-formed bath and shower wall unit into this space.

So the lesson here is all about pre-planning.

There is no way that this space could have been streamlined if it wasn’t planned out first.

Lesson number 2 is behind this door.

All the way down here, we’ve got a substantial bugging and gapping going on. So we all know that fillers are essential part to any renovation. Fillers and sealants and all those sort of things that we use but there is such a fine line between when a filler is okay and when it’s appropriate and when you’re putting in like nearly two centimeters thick.

So what that tells me is that, unlike the bathroom area, this wasn’t planned very well. Someone cut before they measured twice and instead of just putting another piece of timber there, they’ve actually balded it up. As a consequence, it completely detracts from the remodeled renovation. It makes you question what else is bald and in the end, it seeds out in the buyer’s mind which is not a winner for everybody.

Now, the next really amazing positive that I want to show you in this space is the mirror and the vanity area. They’ve done a really cool job, it’s a lovely stone benchtop with an inset basin which is great.

So I know that this wall here is actually shared with the apartment next door. So there is no way that we could put in literally this thick wall, a shared cabinet if it’s backed on to an external wall. But what they have done is they’ve thought outside the box. They’ve thought laterally literally.

Instead of having only one mirror here, they’ve popped another mirror on the side and popped in a cabinet here that opens. So because this wall is actually shared within the apartment, it’s not an external shared wall with another apartment.

So we had three things here that we can learn from. The amazing ability to plan and that’s from having a pre-fab unit put straight into a perfectly good fitting and existing slot. The when enough is enough. When it’s not okay to just keep gapping and to keep filling and when it actually gets to a point when it actually degrades your renovation which is so uncool. And of course, how important to think literally.

But the big key from these guys is no matter where you are in the world, no matter what you’re doing in the world, there is always a space you can learn from to take home positives and also to learn from other people’s mistakes or other people’s challenges.

So, I’ll leave you with that.

Let’s renovate.