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.

The letterbox saga

Well drilling extra holes in did not make any real difference and so...

Things are moving on as we have found a builder and one who can start next month. A bit of haggling to do before we sign the contract but we are pretty much there. Also, we have found a house to rent while the work is being done. It is pretty much the same distance from the centre of Ballyferriter, on the Dingle side, as we are on the Dunquin side.
("Centre" being defined as the door to Murphy's pub.)

When did you last think about your letterbox?

Assuming you are in the UK and within an urban / suburban area, it is in your front door, right? Perhaps it is in the centre midway, perhaps near the bottom, sometimes it has turned 90 degrees and is in the side of the door, but it is there, and you make use of it without even thinking about it. A truly taken for granted part of urban life in the UK.

Not so in rural Kerry, leastways not in our bit of the Kingdom. The house we bought, now our main residence does not have a letterbox in the front door, nor the back door – not anywhere. The suggestion that came from the local Post Office was to leave a window open so that the postal delivery person could pop the mail through it. This felt very wrong to our London urban sensibilities and so we opted to buy a post box and mount it on the gate post.

Stainless steel in place

Cleverly (we thought) we bought a stainless-steel model as we recognised that it would be contending with the wet, windy, westerlies that form a key part of the Kerry climate. Our smugness soon vanished, right after the first period of heavy rain. Sufficient rain found its way in to the box to sodden everything in it.

This week we enjoyed that latest episode of sodden mail and decided to do something about it so off we went to the (very good) local hardware store to get a replacement. They had two models on offer, so I asked an assistant if either of them was weatherproof.

Once he had finished chuckling at the very idea he admitted that neither of them would contend with West Kerry’s driving rain and he recommended that we drill holes in the bottom of the one we had to let the water out. Another customer of the shop, waiting to ask the self-same assistant for help with paint, added that she had taken this course and it worked for her.

Back home, drill out. Slightly surprised to see that the box already has two holes in its base… it now has six. I have my doubts if it will make a difference. (Note to self – make sure the new front door has a letterbox.)