First Week living in Ireland

And so the first week of living in Ireland permanently is over and we ask ourselves where did that go and how come we had not a minute to spare. How did we ever fit in time to go to work…?

We departed Beckenham at 7am on Saturday 30^th June and hit the road for Holyhead. It was a perfect day for a 7-hour journey, bright sunshine and only the occasional traffic issue. Our aim was to arrive on the island of Anglesey in time for lunch. We had seen a recent restaurant review of a place called The Marram Grass Café. It was a superb review and we thought sure why not let’s try it, https://www.themarramgrass.com/ and the food was absolutely sublime. Although the service was on the chill and casual side but definitely worth the wait.

We stayed overnight in the Dublin flat before hitting the road for Ballyferriter. The four hours of driving a fully laden car seemed to fly by and before long we were in The Kingdom, as native Kerry folk and the tourist industry are wont to call it. Sunday was nothing but relaxing as we looked to organise ourselves for this next stage of life.  This included a long walk on the nearby beach and a hop over to Ventry for a pint of the black stuff at Quinns.

Our first challenge was to prepare for our meeting with David Morarity, our architect. Now we have planning consent we need to move the remodelling of Carrigeen on to the next step, and that means making lots of decisions, materials, finishes, fittings, colours. We spent most of Monday and Tuesday pouring over all the Grand Design magazines and assorted kitchen and bathroom brochures that we had accumulated from the start of the project. Developing our “mood board” was a joy and great fun.

On Wednesday we had four hours of discussion with David that commenced with a bit of self-congratulating at winning the appeal and gaining an over rule of the local planning officer. ( We used “victory” quite a lot.)We moved on as quickly as possible to a redesign of the internal layout. The time spent living in the house and wondering whether we’d get permission to do the build, gave us a chance to rethink some aspects of the layout.  Besides the musings over where to put sockets, wall lights, we needed to make decisions about heating systems, window types, what flooring we might choose. This is all to prepare the “Tender pack”.

This next stage is to put together a detailed specification of the build so as to put it out to tender to contractors for quotes. We needed to include all the details of the elements that have an implication for the work. By being as certain and detailed as possible at this stage minimises the number of changes we look for

during the build. As David M pointed out, making changes now, on paper, costs nothing whereas making changes onsite, during the build will cost – time and money. We now have a fairly good idea of how it is all going to pan out and what it might look like. If we can find a contractor who is ready and willing, we could see the work start by October.

These three days felt like a real start to living in Ireland and having Ballyferriter West as the location of our main residence. Even though there is every chance that we will end up spending much of the next 12 months not living in the house as it is pulled apart and remodelled with the planned extension.