Ian Ugarte walks through converting a single house into multiple micro-apartments by subdividing rooms, adding kitchenettes, and creating separate entrances. He shows how to turn a garage into a habitable unit and split bathrooms, claiming rent can more than double with these low-cost changes.
Questions this video answers
6 by 6 meters.
Ian Ugarte; uploaded March 5, 2021.
Two micro-apartments (from a four-bedroom layout).
Chapters
The next two weeks is going to be an amazing conversion of this property to be able to take the rent to more than double what they would get as a normal everyday residential property.
We're in an open plan living area and we've now going to create a bedroom by putting a wall up through here and down here and and then another wall that will come in through and encapsulate part of this island bench to make a room behind us as well. So let's see what it looks like. Here we are just a couple of weeks down the track and what a change we've now got. The island bench has been built over the top of. So in the future if they want to take it back to a standard everyday house, all they need to do is remove that wall, clean the silicon off the top of the bench and we've got the open plan living that was here before. And this is the existing garage, 6 by 6 meters and it's a far enough distance off the boundary to make it a habitable area. But what you'll see in a couple of weeks time when I continue with this video is that there'll be a new wall that comes through here. The opening from the bedroom sitting area and the kitchenette which will go in this back corner. What a great room. Yes, it's a smaller space but it adds to the bedroom that's now been made out of the living area. Garage door is on the other side of this wall. You wouldn't even know that this used to be a garage with the finishes that we've got in here, full kitchenette, sitting area and their own bedroom. Really great outcome. This is the second part of the garage conversion as we're coming through in a couple of weeks. There'll be the kitchenette here and also the laundry that's getting converted into a bathroom. We're moving the laundry outside so a really smaller style room but again at a lower price point for someone who can save themselves a lot of money and be quite comfortable. All right stuff, slight change to plan. We ended up with the kitchen along this back end. But you can see the new walls will take up just over a bit more than a half of this garage as creating this room. Really nice finishes and again may just does an amazing job at staging out and getting people the imagination of them living sitting on the couch, watching the TV and sleeping at nighttime. Really great room. Really love it. This is the laundry where the washing machine normally goes. We're going to put the shower and then the wardrobe that's to side Here it will have the shelves cut out of it and we will put the toilet in there. Slight change to plans. And that's always happening on our job sites because we turn up on site, we go, what is a better and practical outcome that will also save money and not actually devalue the rent that you're going to get? It was a great outcome for this really big open plan bathroom for an old laundry which, you know, I look at laundries and I sometimes think, wow, what a waste of space. But this has been a better use of space. Fully waterproofed and fully okay to be used by someone in the next few years. Here we've got the four bedrooms in the house. We've got the master bedroom here, bedroom two, bedroom three and bedroom four. What we're gonna do out of these four bedrooms is create two micro apartments. How that's gonna happen is a door across here and that will then mean that we can screw that door off. And these two rooms will then have a hallway. So their front door will be in here. Be able to walk into this room which will have a kitchenette and back room which will have their bedroom. Spaces like this are the premium spaces. Spaces where you've got a sitting room and you've got a bedroom and a separate bathroom and kitchenette will make a huge difference to the income that you get. Remembering that people save themselves a lot of money by living in this style of accommodation. When we look at four bedroom, two bathroom houses, they generally separate the toilet to the rest of the bathroom. Now that's an absolutely positive thing for us to. Because the way we create extra bathrooms is that we add a shower and a vanity into here to use this toilet and then we put a toilet in the bathroom. So now we've made two bathrooms out of one bathroom. So I won't be able to stand here in the next video, but we will show you what it looks like because it will then become an ensuite as part of the room next door. Okay. 180 degree view of what we were previously. I was standing the other way facing the camera. You're actually sitting right above the toilet right now. We added a shower after we closed off that wall. We've added a vanity into this room. And then we opened up a doorway to be able to be an ensuite for this micro apartment in here. Master bedroom, we have a walk in wardrobe and an ensuite bathroom. Now these are the easiest to convert because generally what we'll have is a basin or vanity. What we're also going to do is cut a hole through the wall and put an opening in so that this will be their bedroom area and their sitting area will be through there with a kitchenette. This is going to be a really nice room, and it's going to probably premium rent for the entire property. With a view of the pool, as I predicted. What a great room. You can see the bathroom exactly the same. Nothing's changed. But over my shoulder, you can see the hole through the wall to go into what used to be the fourth bedroom. There's a fridge, a sink, a microwave, and it really is going to be the pick of all the rooms in this house. This is the thing about what we do. Using these spaces in different ways is a great outcome. Great spaces out of a large living area to save people one third or one half of their normal weekly rent.
