Our House

When Colm and I got married we were 'of no fixed abode'. We didn't own a house, we lived in a mobile home for bit and stayed with his mother for another while. We were both farming separately, about 20miles (32km) apart. We each had a herd of cows which was calving and needed tending to and I often stayed the night near mine and him near his. I was also pregnant with Maeve, our honeymoon baby!
When we were married a few months, when friends of ours approached us, saying that they were selling their house and land , and would we know of anyone interested. No long after, ( about a day) we decided to buy it! We sat at their kitchen table and made the deal. While we were there another man rang to say he wanted it!
We moved in about a month before M was born.
It was originally a cottage, but was hugely extended in the late 1970's. The last family had 8 children in family at one time, (not all their own) but they all lived here and needed beds! So this house was built by their father to suit them.
Wait for it.......it has 9 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, a kitchen, 2 livingrooms, an office, laundry/boot room. I think that's it!
Needless to say, that is way too big for most families, including ours. We never used upstairs in the first 6 years we lived here, It had never really been finished in the 80's, and we hadn't touched it in our time here.
Over time the ceilings upstairs had deteriorated due to leaking chimney flashings, and poor heating was only adding to the problem. So the time had come to tackle the issue....

We demolished all the internal stud walls that were there, and started afresh. we changed nearly the whole layout. We insulated all the walls and ceilings as well as we could. Many's a night we sweated and swore while we cut up and put in place, rolls and rolls of insulation. We got new roof windows in, got new stud walls put up, new plumbing, new electrics and got the whole lot replastered. Then I got to paint it all, with the help of my freind Lisa.
It was a huge undertaking, but with the big slow down in the building trade here, we got lots of great work done at great prices and we did lots of the work ourselves.

Just before Christmas we all moved upstairs to our new rooms.

This is what the kids rooms look like now......

The girls are asleep in their cots in the last photo, btw.

There is still a lot left to be done, our bedroom was only given a lick of paint, it wasn't included in the main renovation, it's upstairs but kind of seperate. The bathroom is being used but is far from finished! And guess what, the cows are calving again, seeing as it's spring, so I'll have to wait another while until that slows down, in about May, maybe!

If you'd like to look at the whole process... all the photos are here

Of course now the problem now is we're not using the downstairs bedrooms at all..... We may in time turn it into separate guest accomodation or a granny-flat for one of our mothers, should one of them need it. It would lend itself to this kind of thing because they're all in the single storey part of the house.

PS.I meant to mention that Astrid's blog was a huge source of inspiration, and she was a answered many mundane questions about insulation and roof windows! She photographed every step of their renovations, which I pored over, often!

Take care, where-ever you are reading this from.