Episode 018 – Room by Room: Backyards & Bonus Rooms

We are going Room by Room to teach you just what you Should Have and what you Must Have inside each. This episode is the Backyards and Bonus Rooms!  Michelle is on a buying spree and has taken this as a great opportunity to pick up more properties.  While she's putting them together, she's put together a list for you of what is really important and what items are critical to have inside your Short-Term Rental.  We would love to have to add your two cents, as well.  So, please find our Facebook page and add to the conversation.

Plus, contest details are inside this episode!  Enter to win BIG!!  Go and Grow!

Transcript of this Episode:

Hi, it's Michelle, a master of money mindset, and you are listening to BNB dash boss podcast.

And in today's podcast, we're going to be talking about bonus rooms and backyards, baby bonus rooms, backyards, baby. That's right. I can say all those BS together without slurring. I was pretty good at saying Peter Piper picked a Peck of pickled peppers, but I'm really good with bees. Okay. I heard the smart ass remarks right there.

But anyways, let me just remind you that our show today is brought to you by audible. Audible is where you get your audio books online and get a 30 day trial into the audible membership for free. By going to audible trial.com forward slash S T R revenue. That's audible trial.com. S T R revenue. You'll get your first audio book for free and 30 days into the audible membership just for trying us out.

You'll love audible right [email protected]. You can find our $7 courses available for you to try. Find out how to cohost, how to do rental arbitrage or how to invest in real estate. We're all three, by going to B and b-boss.com and clicking on our store. And you'll find our $7 courses right there. Try this out.

You'll love it. You'll love those courses and they're only there for a limited time. So do it also, don't forget our contest. We've got our contest running right now in every week. We're picking up. And everyone's names are going to be put into a drawing at the end for a final price of an Amazon Dodd with a little clock on it.

And your guests will love that. There'll be able to walk right in, ask Alexa to connect to their account, and there'll be able to play their favorite music, ask for the weather or whatever else they want to ask Alexa to do pretty darn awesome. And I would really greatly. You going to iTunes and leaving me a five star review.

I appreciate it. So please do take a picture of it. Send it over to me at Michelle at BNB dash boss. Let me know that you did, and we'll enter you in those drawings. Now let's get into our bonus rooms and backyards. I love doing this one and I was talking to my husband and trying to get him to do it with me.

And he did not want to come on, but. I just wanted to pre Quill this whole thing with some warnings, a lot of the things that you have in your bonus rooms, in your backyards and stuff, a lot of those things are going to increase your liability. So you may have an increase of your insurance as well, but that's okay.

The extra income they create will well be worth it. So just hold that in mind. In most of the locations, let's start with a bonus room. There are a few other places where we have, you know, game rooms and stuff. But most of them they're all in Florida. I'm kind of thinking in the back of my head, we do this because in a lot of our areas, if you have a house and the house has a garage, and you're only using the house for a short term rental, the garage is pretty much useless, right?

People can park outside in the driveway. They don't need to use the garage. And so a lot of houses in Florida will convert the garage into a game. We don't leave the garage door openers anywhere. We make sure that those are shut and sometimes we even lock them so that people can't open it up. Sometimes we do.

And sometimes we don't, it pretty much depends on the neighborhood, but most of these rooms, these garages, we can have the flooring done, paint the inside. Obviously the insides of these garages all have dry wall and they're all done and painted. But we'll put pool tables in there, or foosball tables, air hockey tables, game tables, some even have pinball machines and jukeboxes, and sometimes they're themed and not, but I mean, the really cool people absolutely love them.

I think the best reason why is if you're renting a house. A big house, two people with a lot of kids. So this is like literally when we first started going to Florida and we were renting out a house year after year after year, we'd always get the same house and it had a big game room in the garage. And what I loved about this is when you're coming from out of state and we didn't have any properties in Florida yet we didn't have annual passes.

So not having annual passes. We had to. The tickets from Disney or universal. And you got like a number of days, so you might get a five day pass with, you know, a park hopper and stuff or whatever it was on it, but you'd be there for an entire week. So you had two days where you were just resting and I love that and I sure miss it because my husband, once we got annual passes, once we had properties in Florida and we got our IDs for Florida and we got annual passes.

Then we could be at the park all day, every day. And you know, my husband was, oh my gosh, he is virtually a slave driver, like cracking the whip every morning. Like we're gonna be there as soon as the gates open and the kids aren't, I are like, oh my God, I'm so tired. Just let us sleep in. And if you have to go every day, you get blown out.

I mean, you get really blown out. So I love it if, and I definitely re recommend putting it on there. Anyone who stays for a week or more should absolutely have two days of rest in there for kids as a mother of five. I'm going to tell you, if you take your kids to theme parks every day, all day for seven days in a row, you are asking for somebody at some time, if not everybody at every different time to have a major blow.

Because kids need to rest. They can't have that constant stimuli because it overstimulates them. They lose their shit ran and they just had these blowouts where they just freak out or little kids, they need naps. And I loved being close to the parks so that I could say, okay, you guys stay, I'm taking the little ones back.

And when I put the little ones down for a nap for an hour or two guess who was down for an app with them? Yeah, I was, I was like, oh, I'm going to just fall asleep here. The thing is when you have a place where the kids can have that downtime, there are less fights, less struggles, less everything. I mean, it just is so much.

More relaxing to have a vacation where you're not constantly go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. You know, like when kids can just relax and have fun or when you can just say, okay, look, here's the days of the week. See how it goes, right? Because sometimes kids get sick too. So a lot of times when we were out there, somebody get a bug because they're just not used to the water.

They're not used to the food. Something happens that, you know, the climate change going from the desert to this humidity was really. The ideal thing for them. So there might be one day where you had a couple of kids who are sick and it was like, okay, this is the day we're going to take off. And the other kids would be playing in that game room.

So game rooms are super fun and super important and areas like that. And if you've got a place on the lake, there's going to be some people who don't like to go in the lake. I E I'm raising my hand right now, because guess what? My mom and dad lived on the Mississippi river and I can tell. All the years my parents lived on the Mississippi river.

Like literally I could take a fishing pole and plop it out the window of their living room and kitchen and cast my line into the Mississippi. That's how close my parents' house was. They were right on the Mississippi. They had their boats and everything right there, their docks and everything. I have never put my toe in the Mississippi river.

I'm like Cicero is laughs and gives me the little Tarzan video of the baby elephant going now. I don't think it's sanitary and that's pretty much how I am. Like, if there's not chlorine in it, I'm not going in it. It was like, I'm not going in it. I don't belong in that water if I can't see the bottom of it.

And if there's something living in it, I'm certainly not going. Living on the river and having, you know, property on lakes and rivers and things like that. Game rooms are amazing fun and something to do when everybody's off the river, like something did you at night, I love having things for family members to do so inside your game room, like I said, we had all those things, the pool tables, foosball, air hockey, game tables, pinball machines, Tupac's all that.

But I also recommend very durable furniture, right? So things can spill on it, but games, lots of games, not just video games, but games, board games, things that family members can do. And cards, we always had a bunch of card games, including like skip Bo and UNOS skippo is my kids' favorite. We loved playing.

UNO was our favorite. And now there's something called cards against humanity. If you have not played bad, that's pretty much for adults, but when the adults get bigger, have one of those games in there, you'll get so many people telling you all the fun that they had, but make sure you make everything easy to clean inside your game room.

That there isn't a lot of that. The place for white furniture, right. Is definitely, yeah. Because things are going to be taken in there. Lots of drinks and snacks make it easy for people to clean it up, you know, just so that they don't freak out because, oh my gosh, my kids spilled something on there and you're like, no worries, man.

We just holds that stuff up. I mean, that's pretty close to the type of furniture you want to have it. I know that a lot of people don't like leather, but I love leather when it comes to things like that, because leather is super easy to clean. If it's treated properly, we treat our leather and have a lot of leather couches in a lot of places, because it's basically like a vinyl, but nicer, it's super easy to wash off.

He gets Murphy's oil soap and you can wipe that baby down and you're going to get everything off of it. We leave Murphy's oil soap for the parents and let them know that, oh, this is. Murphy's oil soap and a little water and almost everything comes out of there. So I also get people asking while, you know, what, if they break something, what if they take it or gets stains on it or break it?

And you're like, well, that's why you have insurance. That's why the first thing you do. Is go to your insurance guy. We have proper insurance on top of our Airbnb and all the other insurances we have, but they have a thing that we sign and it has a questionnaire also asking if you have bikes or golf carts or swimming pools, things like that.

Those are going to raise your insurance liability. And you're going to have to pay a little bit more, but when you have things like jukeboxes and stuff, you want to have pictures of everything that you have that's of any value that you think somebody could break, just have a picture of it. And if somebody breaks it, turn it in.

And what's really nice too, is we make people pay deposit. But we also have insurance on it. So if our insurance covers the majority of it and our insurance is a thousand dollar deductible or something, then those people, we just ask them to pay the thousand dollar deductible. We don't go absolutely crazy and say, well, you're going to have to pay the whole value of this, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

We're only out a thousand bucks. We only asked the guests to cover that thousand bucks because that's what insurance is for. We're not in this to make money off of an insurance claim. We're actually in it to provide a service to a family and shit happens, man. I got five kids and I can tell you they've broken a lot of things.

So don't worry about what people are going to break. If you are constantly worried about everything inside your guest's house, don't have it in there. I always tell people, I have a friend she lives up in Canada and she's got a lovely home. And she was thinking about renting out her home, home, like her real residence.

And I was like, girl, you do not want to rent out your real residence. People will go through your stuff. They go through everything and they will ruin things you don't want to place. That is, it's just my opinion, but man, I wouldn't run out my personal, personal space to anybody or any amount of money, but my places that I say on vacation, absolutely.

I would, because I don't mind sharing. I'm used to sharing my vacation spots. That's just me. If that's not you and you feel like you're totally cool with that. I guess I could throw a bunch of stuff in the closet, you know, and if you can do that, that's fine. Do whatever floats your boat, but just remember, shit's going to get broken.

It's going to get stolen. It's gonna get spilt on. You want to make sure that things can get rushed and you want to make sure that they're durable, especially if you're renting out to families and big groups of people. And most of this. Is in regards to groups of big people. You want to keep everything clean and safe and inviting, right?

You want to make sure that whatever you have open to somebody that you don't have a lot of uneven areas. We had this area in one of our properties in Tucson and the backyard. It was close to the university and the backyard people. Put in their own cement and inside this meant they had put beer bottles.

Yeah, I know. Right. Must have been owned by the parents of the kids or going to school there or something. And they thought it'd be really cool to have beer bottles, but it made the pavement very uneven. It was terrible. And so when we bought it, it was like, are we going to pull all of this out? I mean, this is going to be a pain in the butt in order to fix it up and stuff, it was just tens of thousands of dollars.

It would have cost to make it the way I wanted it to look, but just getting everything even so that there aren't bottles that people could, like, what if they tripped on that, the bottle broken and cut them. I mean, there's just a bunch of things you have to make sure that you're making sure that everything is safe, right.

Now I want you to think about the area where your rental property is and what's going on around there. So maybe you're on a golf course. So you might want a golf cart and golf equipment and things like that. If you're close to the ocean, you might want surf boards or snorkel equipment, but you have to make sure that when you have the snorkel equipment, you clean it between gas, that you soak it and bleach.

If you have snorkel equipment and dive equipment, you know how to clean it, it's rather easy. But you know, it has to be done with each and every guest. So if you're by a lake, you might have canoes and kayaks. I love going canoeing and kayaking. It's funny. Cause I like ships and boats and things like that.

Not just big potties of water, my kids crack up when I go snorkeling or something like that, because the whole time I'm like, oh my God, it's touching me. Just see where he's touching me. Well, practically what themselves laughing at me, but I do, I love going kayaking, canoeing, snorkeling, things like that. I just love having fun, but make sure if you have those things that you have life vests and life jackets for everyone in every size, because you are going to be responsible for that.

Okay. And a ski lodge or something. If you have your favorite Winchell place, you can talk to them and maybe they can even have a small discount or you can get some kind of kickback for recommending. Those are really nice. So you don't have to have your own equipment. So if you don't have your own equipment, make sure you have a place or they can get their own equipment.

I love having sand buckets and things like that for kids to play in when they're by the beach, because that's what kids want to do when they're there. They want to go play in the sand. And the parents wanted have the little boogie boards and things like that for the kids. They might not want the full blown surfboards, but floaty toys and the pool and pull tubes and things like that.

Those are great things to have because it just makes it fun for everyone else. I was going to talk about boats because my parents, my mom had what we called Mickey's marina. She had a bunch of boats. She and my dad. When you have property on a lake or on the water, you might be inclined to rent out your boat.

And I just want to remind you that renting out your boat is something completely different. There is not an insurance for that. Unless you get specific rental insurance for your boats. Now there are websites out there where you could rent your cars to people. So you can leave a car and literally rent the car to the people who are renting.

That's a great way to make money. If you want to do that, and you're not afraid, but you need that company and you need to get insurance specifically for that. Okay. Because handing your keys to a complete stranger for a vehicle or a boat, that's a big step. And that requires a different set of insurance and it requires a whole different liability for you yourself as well.

So, You want to make sure that you have those contracts and that they're all legal. You want to talk to the different websites that do that. And not only van everyone. Needs to have a life vest in some areas they have to be wearing those life vests or life jackets. Some, they just have to have them and they have to be out in the open and you have to make sure that there's enough for the people on the boat.

So depending on where you live, you got to know all the rules of the water and everybody's gotta be following those rules. And somebody breaks those rules. Who's responsible who owns the boat. Gotta be really careful. I do love going boating. Boating is a lot of fun, but I don't know that I would want to be responsible for what people did in a boat because I've been on a boat and I'm a people on a boat and I've been with people on a boat.

I can tell you a lot of things happen on a boat like Vegas, right? It's like. What happens on the boat stays on the boat. You just don't want anybody to know. It was like, there was a ton of times where you would say, oh shit, don't tell dad, don't tell dad, we'd get done driving the boat. We'd be like, oh, dad's going to kill you.

Oh man. Don't tell dad that you guys know exactly what I'm talking about. Okay. Now let's go on to the backyard. I love having backyards. When you have. Just someplace for kids to run around. If you allow pets, it's a necessity, you have to have a yard so they can do their duty out there. And there's equipment for them to pick up their duty when they've done that.

But I don't like having playground equipment. And there's a few reasons for that because playground equipment, it has to be anchored correctly. Kids can fall off. A lot of times he got to remember that these parents are on vacation. They're going to be doing a lot of things. Might have a lot of kids or might be a lot of people in their family there.

I mean, whatever's going. They're going to be distracted. And so if a kid falls and gets hurt, I mean, that just puts you at a lot of liability. I don't care what kind of ground covering you have. It can also be too hot for the kids and kids can get burns going down the slides and stuff, especially in Arizona and Florida, they get splinters when the wood gets old and gross.

It's just a big, big upkeep. I do not like having playground equipment, but I like knowing where the playgrounds are. So I can say, Hey, there's a playground right down the street or right on the corner or something else. So I make sure that I'm close to some amenities when I'm buying a property. And these might be amenities that I don't want the upkeep of.

That's why I really love community pools and stuff, because then I have to have the pool and if I can get a property that's close to the community. Oh, my gosh. That's like a big one. Cause it's, then I don't need a pool. I don't need to have somebody going and taking care of the pool and doing the chemicals and cleaning out the pool and making sure that everything is working all the time.

That's just an added expense for me. So I would rather be. Larger HOA. Right. And be able to just send my people like, oh, you're, you know, a half block from the community pool and you can go right there and, oh, not only do they have a community pool, but there's a workout room there and there's a pool table in there and there's, you know, all this.

So I love having places like that amenities that are really close, that I don't have to pay for, unless it's in the form of an HOA. And then I don't even mind because it takes all of that off of my plate. That takes us to the backyard. People love pools. They love pools and hot tub. They love the water. If you can get a backyard with a pool or hot.

Or room for a pool or a hot tub. And you are in like Flynn, because it's fantastic. And if you can put like a volleyball net in there, if you're not close to a community pool, I mean, people love, they, they up your insurance. Yes. But they also up your income. So what else do we love? We'd love to have a place to eat a place to sit a place to sun.

These are our favorite things to have in the backyard. When we do this barbecue grills, make sure if you have barbecue grill that you have the grill equipment that goes with it, you know, the tongs and the flippers and stuff like that. You want to make sure that people have everything they need to clean the grill, the foil and everything so that they don't make a mess.

And your grill gets all messed up because between people you're going to have to clean that grill as well. But people love to have grills, especially if they've got a griller in their family. My husband's a griller and. Having a grill at our rental property, make sure that when you do have the places to eat or sit that if it's a sunny place like Arizona, we've got umbrellas and someplace to sit out of the sun out of the weather.

I love having you. In Florida, they call them lanais, just like they do in Hawaii. And Olena is just the covered patio area in Arizona. It's just the cover patio. But if you want to be like super special, just go, oh, the Lanai, you know, having a covered Lanai is a nice thing, especially in Florida because it rains a lot.

So when you can have something that's covered like that, that's great in Arizona. It's nice to have a covered because it gets hot. And you need some protection from the sun, not so much the rain. So having a covered place to stay is really nice. And if you've got a nice big lawn, you can have tons of different games out there, like corn hole or putt, putt golf.

Uh, I don't recommend the real dark game, but they have some that are, that are, you know, like the dark game. But more with things that are safe, things that are safe to do, you know, have sports equipment. And like I said, two of your close to a tennis court have tennis equipment, right? You want sports equipment for the area?

I love tetherball things that family members can do together. If you've got a big enough area and you've got a place for them to play volleyball in the pool, or even volleyball outside the pool, people love when they get together in a big area to play volleyball together. You know, some kind of sporting games, kids love that.

Like I said, if you have a pool, you want the toys and the tubes and things like that. One of my favorite things to have in Arizona and my husband has built some for us in a few of our places, our fire pits. I love having a fire pit. It gets cool at night in Arizona in the winter time and Florida too.

Right. Having a nice place to just have a fire is so great. We've had places with gas, fire pits, where you have to turn them on. Those keys can get lost a lot. And I love having the gas fire pits. They're great. Right. But at the same time, I think that the regular fire pits are my favorite plus, then people can cook over them.

You can't really cook marshmallows, roast marshmallows over a fire pit. If it's a gas fire pit, you can, but you're going to taste it. And probably a regular fire pit is better and it's cheaper to bank anyway. So I love fire pits. Oh. And if you've got grass, what is really cool is to have sprinkler. I when I was a kid, I loved playing in sprinklers.

And so we've gotten these crazy little weird sprinkler things that we have out there. And we just put them in a box and have the directions and tell the parents, you know, just connect us to the hose and go put it out in the middle and the kids can run through it. And kids love that. So we've put out like the water guns, those guns that you suck up the water and then sport the water out, you know, put tons of those kinds of things for water fights outside.

Kids love that stuff. They love having water fights with their parents and those, uh, they're like tubes, they look like tubes. The kids can just suck up the water from the buckets, or they can just suck up the water from the pool. Right. And then have these cool water fights with them. But kids love to have that any kind of, you know, funding that kids might not have in their area too.

And the last thing I wanted to cover is bikes. Bikes are great, but when you have bikes, you have to make sure you number one, get the insurance for it. That is absolutely number one. And make sure you have the helmets, right? What make it legal for people. And you're going to have to sanitize those and clean those every time somebody leaves, but not just that you're going to have to have locks for them so that people can lock them up.

If they go. And you're going to have to have directions to bike paths. That's not too hard. There's a great area in Florida. It's a more expensive area if you can afford to buy in there or rent in there, but it's celebration celebration. There's no area like it. Well, not very many areas where he can just ride your bike and you feel really great about riding your bike.

It gets a Disney designed neighborhood and town. And it's very close to Disney world. When you have a place in there. I mean, they're all very expensive to own, but if you can have your bikes in there, people love riding their bikes around that neighborhood. I mean, it's just like so Americana it's so. Just gorgeous.

And it looks like a little slice of an American apple pie city. You know, the houses have the rocking chairs on the front yards and everything, and it's just a great place to ride round. Now, here in Arizona, I love riding my bike and we have a great bike path down in Tucson. My husband actually today was even looking because we just picked up another property and it's very close to a bike path.

And we're like, let's get some bikes, you know, when we go down there because the bike paths are tree-lined and they're absolutely beautiful. So even for this time of the year, they would be really great to have. So we're picking up a couple of bikes for our property down there that he stays out a lot.

It's nice. So we can stay there and we enjoy it a lot. So having bikes there would make it even more enjoyable for us. I told him, I said, if we could just duplicate this little. On the beach. I said, it's pretty much one of the perfect size places that we have for a vacation rental. I'm like, oh man, I would cookie cutter the crap out of this.

This place is perfect. It's got the perfect size living room. Perfect size kitchen, dining, laundry, bedroom, bathroom. Everything has just a really nice size. I really love it. That that finishes up on a room by room. If you've got additions to make to this, please, please. Write them in and, you know, put them on our Facebook page and let us know what you have that we forgotten because there are more things.

I mean, there are more things out there when I was writing those list out, I was like, I'm forgetting something, I'm forgetting something pretty major. I'm like, I had another list and I turned that in so that they could turn it into show notes and I'm like, okay, where is that? I don't know where it is.

Like, I, I have a feeling of forgetting something and then I was like, well, maybe I'm not, but if I do, I apologize. But the most important thing is with these things is to make sure that everything that you have, you have pictures of and your insurance is covering. Okay. Because your added insurance is super important and you want to make sure you cover yourself of any liability.

It's great to have. Your insurance agent look things over and tell you, you know, it would be really great if you put a fence around this pool because in this area it's required or it would be really great. If you had a sidewalk that went here or look at this stone here, this makes this more dangerous.

Or can you do something about those steps? Maybe we can, even those out of bed, your insurance agent is there to cover your assets. The first three letters of that. So you want to make sure that you always do what you can to make your safe. Like I said, clean number one, write safe and aesthetically pleasing to the eye.

You want to make sure that people just get there and they go, man, I love this place. I want to come back year after year after year. That's what you want. You want people to come back year after year after year. Just make the place, the most inviting place you can possibly make it and just make their vacation the most special you can possibly.

Okay. So I wanted to say thanks again for listening and thanks for your five-star reviews. God bless you. Have a great day. Stay safe. Go and grow!!