Page 5

It’s great fun building your own home without any outside interference whatsoever. Now, I know that may sound nerve-wracking to most people, but I loved every moment of the procedure. Having handled countless house-building projects for clients over a couple of decades, this was my time in the sun.  And I made the most of it.

As the house was in a very pretty place - on an island in Galway Bay, no less - I visited regularly when the builders were absent, just to enjoy the site itself. On Sundays I would pack a small picnic, pick up the Sunday Times and head for Aughinish. It was a lovely summer in 2001 and I would carry my picnic and newspaper, sit on an ancient stone – once part of the old cottages – and relax. I remember the extremely loud, relaxed buzzing of the bumble bees as they went about their leisurely business on those glorious afternoons. On other Sundays, I climbed over the back wall and sat in the long grass on my blue and yellow rug. After my little, solitary picnics, I would pack my belongings into the car and walk to the beach, which was just a couple of hundred metres away. I had a special rock on which I loved to sit and look out over the bay to Salthill and Barna on the opposite side.

These were memorable and wonderful times and put the difficulties of my move back to Ireland the previous year right to the back of my mind. My focus changed completely and I felt the deep stresses of the past couple of years dissolving into the milky waters of Galway Bay.

Then it would be Monday again and my house was progressing well. The engineer would appear on site regularly to sign off the various stages of the build to enable me to draw-down my mortgage as agreed with the bank.

I chose my tiles, sanitary-ware, skirting, window-cills, doors and their handles, architraves and frames. I picked out my kitchen too – and herein lies a story.

Now, I’m an interior designer, helping clients to choose their kitchen finishes on virtually a weekly basis, so you would think that this would be a piece of cake for me. Not. The little story I’m going to tell you made me realise how many people, building their own homes, must be undergoing bullying on a huge scale.

I had decided I wanted a cream painted kitchen (very revolutionary in the west of Ireland in 2001) with beech counter tops. I had designed the kitchen with the sink on an L-shape – not under the window. I wanted my dishwasher in the laundry room, which was directly off the kitchen. The reason for the seemingly odd location of the dishwasher was twofold: living on my own, I only envisioned using it when the family was around; my kitchen was small and I needed all the space possible for my accumulation of crockery and cooking utensils. Also, as the area was open plan and quite small, I didn’t want the possible noise involved when my family was sitting back after supper chatting or playing backgammon or Scrabble. This had been decided. And I’m quite an assertive person. And I had designed it myself. And I’m a highly qualified interior designer. So, no problem – right? Wrong!

My builder informed me that he had a kitchen-maker of choice. Much better, he said, and cheaper, according to him, than my chosen firm. Right, I said. Let’s go and see him. A tall and supremely self-confident kitchen-maker met me and showed me around his showroom. We discussed my kitchen. He said he would quote me and I got back into my car and headed off. I can still remember the exact spot on the road to Kinvara where I pulled in to the side of the road. It was about ten minutes after I had left the kitchen maker on the Dublin Road when the penny dropped. I stopped the car and phoned the builder to inform him that I would not be using his chosen craftsman and that was that.

Here is the reason: I had gone in with everything organised as I have just told you. I had left there having been convinced that I must have a pine kitchen, with black granite countertops. My dishwasher would be under my sink, which absolutely had to be under the kitchen window, which he considered the only possible place for it. I cast my mind back to his showroom. Clue 1: almost all the kitchens were pine. Clue 2: all the counter tops were shiny black granite. How could I have been smooth-talked into such an about-face? Because I’m a woman, I suppose! Thousands of years of being indoctrinated into thinking that men know best. Who knows, but I was furious with myself and resolved to pass on this story to vulnerable home-builders as a lesson in keeping your eye on your goals and not allowing yourself to be smooth-talked into doing anything with your new home that is not part of your dream.

Page three.

Building:

Outline planning permission had been granted with the site. I put in my offer with the estate agent subject to this clause being confirmed and it was. So the sale went through without a hitch. Outline planning permission means you can build within the restrictions that are listed on the form and I set about getting the plans together before I could apply for Full Planning Permission.

I made lots of discoveries at this point. Not all of them good either. First of all, the engineer I had retained insisted that with my limited funds (the South African Rand was not up to much, unfortunately, when it came to converting to Punt) would build me a house of 2,500 sq. feet. Nothing could have been further than the truth. I set out by asking an architect with whom I was working at the time, to put my dream house on paper and he did so; all 2500sq. feet of it. I began to gather quotes from various builders and found, to my horror, that my money only covered a house of half that size, and all that with not even the concrete path around it, nor a driveway, nor walls……….I could go on. It just barely covered a little 1200sq. ft dormer house to the most basic specifications.

I drew up the final plans for that half-sized house and put in my final application with Clare County Council in record time. I discovered that I had to draw in plants and trees around the house too.

I had full planning permission in just over six weeks. I was very impressed with the speed with which they worked and with their amazing efficiency.  

I then went about the task of hiring the builder and organized a water-tight contract. This contract had certain clauses that I felt were necessary. First of all, I insisted that they allow me to add a time limit to the project. I put a time limit of six months from commencement, with the rider that they would pay my rent for every month until the build was completed. In the end, they completed everything within four months, which must have been a world record. They moved so fast that when one of the team got a septic thumb, their man from the office helped with the roof trusses for a week. I know that because I phoned the office and he said he was on my roof! The joys of the diverted telephone; you never know where anybody is when you phone them any more.

The other clause that was inserted was a God-send. They had efficiently listed everything that would be included in the house. If I were to request any changes whatsoever, they would first of all issue me with an invoice that I would settle there and then. We all wanted to avoid a situation where there was a frightening and unexpected bill at the end of the build, due to changes and extras. This happens to so many people who wander on site and say happily  “Just move that wall six inches to the right my good man” and so on, without weighing up the consequences. This costs time and money and can’t be allowed to happen on an efficient building site. So the only change during the entire build was when I asked for clear glass in my shower-room window instead of the obscure glass they had installed. As this was an arguable point, we each paid half. Very civilized, I thought.

The first sod was turned on site in January 2001 with me in attendance with my camera. I wish I could publish these photos on my blog, but can’t seem to get it to work, so if anyone knows how to do this I would really appreciate the information. I’d love everyone to see what a transformation took place.

Because there were so many stone walls, and my builder was extremely keen to have a flat site, I stayed there all day in the freezing cold, wearing a high viz jacket and a hard hat. A huge bulldozer with all sorts of scoop thingys arrived and began knocking my precious stone walls that I loved so much. I was nervous because I was convinced that the builder developed a certain gleam in his eye every time he saw my old stone walls and was aching to demolish everything. I refused to allow them to touch even one single stone that was not absolutely necessary.

The result was an amazing site. An ancient stone cottage with a rusty tin roof was retained, to the huge frustration of the builder, and I left most of a second cottage – only demolishing the walls that had to go to allow room for the scaffolding for the new house. I will add here that from that day until the day I left Aughinish five years later, my neighbour asked me regularly: “When are you getting rid of those old walls?” I always said: “Never!” And I’m so glad I kept them. They provided shelter from the wild, west winds and added a great deal of character to the property.

It looked like a pile of rubble. It WAS a pile of rubble! This could not possibly be the cottage I had expected to see; I had expected something I could convert into my dream home overlooking Galway Bay.  But there was the estate agent’s sign, hanging at a jaunty angle on a telephone pole. And there were the remains of an old stone cottage with no roof and no windows; bits and pieces of old stone walls pushed their way through a carpet of impenetrable brambles and sturdy nettles. I stepped from my car with trepidation.

It was a lovely sunny day in May 2000. A big year in the short history of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger, which had seen me return to Ireland, specifically to Galway, then apparently the fastest growing city in Europe.

Back in the eighties everybody was leaving Ireland in their droves to seek their fortunes. I was no exception and had headed to South Africa with my children. Having qualified as an Interior Designer in the late seventies and widowed in the eighties, I had felt the need for change and a challenge and in 1987 I had departed with all my possessions for Johannesburg. South Africa held a great appeal, having a fabulous climate and, in those days, terrific opportunities for women to forge careers for themselves. Everyone seemed to be leaving there at the time and I was technically swimming against the tide. So it was easy to get sponsorship for a work permit, which usually led to Permanent Residence. By 1989 I had both, though I kept my Irish citizenship and passport – an Irish passport always being a desirable little book to own.

In South Africa I had found life a lot easier than in Ireland and had quickly moved to Nelspruit in the Eastern Transvaal – now the province of Mpumalanga in the New South Africa that emerged after the ANC swept to power in 1994. In Nelspruit I opened my interior design business in a cottage I converted on the corner of Ferreira Street and Ehmke Street. I also commuted to Maputo, the amazing little capital of Mozambique, where I refurbished countless wonderful old Portuguese buildings including ambassadors’ residences and aid agencies and apartments belonging to Mozambican bank directors. These buildings had been abandoned and looted during the nineteen year war that had ravaged that beautiful country on the shores of the Indian Ocean. It was hard work, which had great compensations; it was wonderful to hang curtains and organise furniture in the sunshine, under a huge blue sky, while the palm trees framed the shining ocean.  I loved it and made many friends over the eight year period I spent working there.