Our Home

Our home was built in 1904 and was owned by the same family for a hundred years until we bought it. It is a typical Irish farmhouse of the era which is described as a one and a half story house. The upstairs rooms are partially in the roof space. There are a couple of extensions that have been added over the years.

We have made a few changes over the last year. The first thing was to sort out a bedroom for our daughter. We didn't do a huge amount here except to replace the clipboard floor with deal floorboards and to paint the room suitably for a little girl.

The next thing was to sort out a study so that I could work from home from time-to-time. We used the extension on the right of the house for this room which is a good size and ideally suited for this purpose. The main focus here was to get enough desk-space to run four computers and associated peripherals.

The next project we took on was to renovate the living room. The decor of this room had dated badly so we decided that this needed to be sorted. The main focus was to remove the existing fireplace and back boiler and install a wood-burning stove for central heating. For more details on this project go here.

For another little project, we put floorboards down in the spare room and repainted it. This was fairly straightforward and didn't take a huge amount of time.

During all of this, I had to add two cross-members to the shed roof, as the existing cross-member collapsed in a storm due to a combination of rot and being overloaded with stored timber. The new arrangement is a lot stronger and allows us to store enough timber to be able to take on minor jobs without incurring a trip to the builder's merchant.

The Garden

We essentially had no garden when we moved in and we decided to leave this alone when we moved in in August 2004 as there was enough work to be done in the house. However, once the weather started to warm up, we decided to get ourselves in order and get cracking on the garden. Before we started we had to buy a few things. The full story on the garden is here.

Our first purchase was a 5 x 16 metre polytunnel as this was to become the mainstay of our garden production. While waiting for this to be delivered, I also ordered a cultivator and a lawn tractor with a little trailer. We put the tunnel up ourselves in about a day's work with a little help from Jo's dad.

After this, the main focus was to get as much ground as possible cleared and under production. We planted four ridges along the side of the tunnel - mostly with potatoes but also with some peas and onions.

We also came up with a plan for the main part of the garden which I marked out roughly by cutting out a lawn with the tractor. This involved a curved area of lawn with a number of plots of fruit and vegetables radiating out to another curved path. We cleared one of these plots and raised ridges for it. We put some bare-root fruit bushes in one ridge to keep them happy for the year. In the rest of the space, we put in carrots, parsnips, onions, peas, beans, sprouts and cauliflowers.

We also put in a few fruit trees - a mixture of apples, pears, cherries and plums. Our plan is to add a few to these each year.

Finally, we have planted two specimen trees which are a part of a long-term plan. We have a chestnut and an oak tree, but we need not expect anything significant from this for up to 20 years.

Building Work

We have started on a project to build on a bit more space and also to build a garage as a nice warm dry home for my Jensen Interceptor. We are trying to manage this ourselves by getting in individual tradesmen rather that getting a firm in. So far we are at foundation stage. The work on this is logged on this page.