The Big Day

129 days after putting in our first offer; 16 weeks, 7 days days after going sale agreed, we finally got the keys!

We had a dream of finding a house that we could put our own stamp on. Our goal was to find something that needed cosmetic work, had a decent sized garden, and was within 30 mins of the city centre. My amazing husband went to studied woodworking at Letterfrak, and I grew up watching my parents DIY everything from furniture flips to full house remodels (5 houses that I can remember!) so we both really wanted to try our hand at creating our own home. We had a budget of €475K, which we thought would give a a lot of options, but house prices continued to rise while we searched and there weren't a lot of houses in our budget that fit our criteria.

Our criteria also changed a bit, newly weds in September, we found out that we were pregnant when we got back from our honeymoon! That changed things - too - now we weren't just looking for a house for us, we needed to find something near parks and schools.

We spent months looking for our dream fixer upper. We started out looking in Dublin 2, 4, 6 and 8, since we were familiar with those neighbourhoods. We thought that would give us a lot of options. We were wrong. We then expanded our search to Dublin 3, and found Marino. We loved that it had a neighbourhood feeling, but was still walkable to the city and was built around a series of green spaces.

I'll never forget the day we saw the house - the couple before us walked out saying, "this house is not for us, could you imagine cooking in that kitchen or taking a shower in that bathroom?" Both of us looked at each other, and laughed - we both absolutely could!

When we walked into our house, we fell in love with it immediately. We could see the good bones hiding behind the crazy (70s?) carpet, to the teal bathroom! We knew that we could transform it from it's current state, to something modern and beautiful and we're excited to take you along on the journey as we get started!