The day we shook hands with our builder.

The project to renovate and extend our house in Ballyferriter reaches another milestone. David, our architect, has been working on and preparing the tender pack for our project for the past 6 weeks. We have worked through an enormous amount of detail on the layout, what tiles we will put up, what sanitary ware, where the sockets & lights will be situated, the windows and much more to produce a complete tender pack for builders.

The tender pack stretched to over 40 pages of detail and was sent to 7 builders. Four local builders, one in Tralee and two in Castlegregory. It’s a sign of the times on the Dingle peninsula that all four local builders were too busy. We did get three quotes for the job and after a little discussion between ourselves and David we entered an exclusive conversation with one builder.

Several meetings between “us and them” followed in which we came to understand the implications of a high-water table, external and internal insulation, concrete beams and so on. We indicated that the first quote was way off the mark and so was the second quote…. And yesterday we trashed out more detail and squeezed the project just inside our budget line. And we shook hands on the deal.

Two years after buying Carrigeen we embark on the renovation work. In truth we never imagined this project when we bought the house but then we never imagined a yes vote for Brexit. So here we are with an amazingly exciting 48 weeks to come. Yup, 48 weeks 45 weeks is the timescale of the project (although that includes 12 weeks for weather contingency and based on the storm Helene that went through last night is sensible) and getting a start in three weeks’ time.

Denis Dowling Construction is the builder and our hope is that we are still talking to him at the end of the 48 weeks. He plans to begin work on 9^th October or rather we hand the house over to him on the 9^th. Sometime September 2019 we may move back to Ballyferriter West and our newly renovated home, time and weather permitting.

We move out into rented accommodation in Ballyferriter “East” on Monday 8^th. The rental house, “No 6” as we have christened it, is a bigger house then we have now and probably will have! Another upside is that we can stay there for as long as we want, and we can fit all our furniture for storage into it.

And having shook hands with the builder we are now off on holidays to France today.