New House Tour

We bought the worst house on the best street - a quiet little cul de sac in a nice residential neighbourhood.

Marino (Irish: An Mairíne) is an inner suburb on the Northside of Dublin, Ireland. It was built, in a planned form, on former grounds of Marino House. The initial development featured around 1,300 concrete-built houses. The neighbourhood is arranged around central parks and had neat front gardens for flowers and larger back gardens for fruit and vegetables to feed the family, and orignally each house would have housed a family of 8+!

Today, the area consists of about 1,300 houses built for the most part of concrete, which was an

unusual building material at that time in Ireland. We're lucky that there are so many houses built in a similar style so we can get ideas from others who have remodelled before us. We've been getting lots of inspiration on what we'd like our future home to look like from others in the neighbourhood!

The houses were originally built with a living room, parlour and scullery on the ground floor, with three bedrooms upstairs along with a hot press, bathroom and separate W.C. Ours still have the same floorplan as when it was built.

Ours is a 72 square meter, 3 bed, 1 bath terraced house, almost 100 years old and looks like it hasn't been updated in at least 50 years!

The downstairs is basic enough - a living room, dining room and tiny 'kitchen' (if you can even call it that).

There's a small front room with a working fireplace, although it's definitely in need of a good clean.

The back room is slightly bigger and has a gas heater in place of the original fireplace. We're hoping to remove the existing heater and open the two rooms to give us a nice open plan living/dining room. We'd originally wanted to keep two separate rooms and add and extension, but we don't have the budget for that at the moment, so opening the two rooms will give us the living space that we need without a huge price tag.

The kitchen - if you can even call it that - currently consists of a sink (which only has cold water) over a double cabinet unit and a very old cooker. It looks like it was plumbed for a washer, but I'm not sure where that would have fit. There's also an opening to under stairs storage, which is also where all of our fuses and meters live. Conspicuously missing is any room for a refrigerator! We'll be opening this room up to the current dining room so we'll have a completely open plan living space downstairs.

Upstairs we have a lovely teal bathroom and 3 bedrooms.

We have a good sized front bedroom with a cute original fireplace which will be our master.

A slightly smaller back bedroom which will double as Paul's home office and a guest room.

And a small front bedroom which will be the nursery for Sive. This room only has a 7/8 high wall which we assume was originally to let light into the hallway. We'll be closing that up once we move in.

Backyard was one of the selling points for the house. It's not huge by Marino standards, but it's quite big compared to most Dublin houses we looked at. It also has a small shed which was a selling point for Paul. It should also give us enough room to extend (if we ever have the budget).

As you can see, it's very dated, but it seems to be in great condition - we'll see what it looks like when the wallpaper comes down!