A father and teen son team, along with a couple of pals, have taken a once derelict house, about seven kilometres from the border town of Ballyconnell, and brought it back to life. It’s ready for its next owner to add their edge.
Fadó fadó, sons learned their trades from their father, picking up the skills as they shadowed their parent and learning on the job.
The push away from trades meant many with good skills and instincts were pushed in another direction, and the collection nation lost talent that we took for granted.
Address: Ardlougher, Ballyconnell, Co Cavan, awaiting postcode
Asking price: €245,000 (€1,633 per m²)
Agent: REA Donohoe Spring
Finally, the pendulum is swinging back towards an appreciation of what talented tradespeople bring to our lives, but there’s a lot of lost ground to cover as we try to convince school leavers to eschew the professions.
One Co Cavan builder is doing his bit to shift the dial.
A carpenter by trade, Peter McKiernan brought his son Joey and Joey’s two pals, Fintan Cassidy and Colm Brady, on board for the summer of their TY school year, to help him refurbish and extend a derelict cottage in the townland of Ardlougher.
It was completely derelict and overgrown, he says of the small former council house that he estimates dates from the late 1950s.
“You couldn’t get in the front door.”
He bought the property, which is about seven kilometres outside Ballyconnell, as a pet project, a busman’s holiday, if you will.
Ballyconnell is the starting point of the Shannon-Erne waterway. It is about 88 kilometres from Dublin city centre, and about three kilometres to the north-west of Carrickmacross.
He estimates it was about 75 square metres in size.
He broke down the dividing walls of the original cottage to make room for an open-plan living space with a kitchen at one end.
Home to shaker-style units with laminate worktops, these are painted a pistachio green.
There’s a pantry off the kitchen, and beside it is a large utility and guest W.C.
Overhead, there are exposed waney beams. These still have the bark of the tree on the edges of the wooden planks.
It was an idea he first spotted when he visited his cousin’s place in the Cotswolds. “I always wanted to do it,” he says.
He didn’t want to close off the stairs but rather let the light from the rooflights illuminate its interior.
So now there’s a gantry running between the two loft spaces overhead, where there are two spaces, an attic room and a mezzanine, that he feels would make a good home office.
The exterior of the gantry is panelled in waney boards that give a near shingle effect.
He also didn’t want to block any of the light coming through the windows, so he made a steel spin staircase that has open treads and a bannister on the interior side only.
This leads up to the attic.
In addition to renovating the original house, he added about the same footprint again, bringing the overall square metrage, including the attic level, to about 150 square metres.
The original roof tiles from the cottage have been repurposed on the new build part of the property and painted a farmyard red.
The roof of the original house is now tiled in reclaimed Bango blue slates.
He and the boys made all the internal doors, which are timber panelled with old cottage-style latches, like many homes in the area would once have had.
A set of railway sleeper steps leads up to its two bedrooms. The principal is accessed via a barnyard door and has a pitched roof with strip lighting in the shadow gaps where the walls meet the ceiling.
It has exposed concrete formwork walls, made on site, and while the electrics are chased, they’re housed in industrial-style casing and have industrial-style switches.
This part of the house has been wrapped externally.
The A3 BER-rated house is finished, he says. Agents REA Donohoe Spring is seeking €249,000 for it.
What makes it interesting is that it’s not so done that you can’t put your own stamp on it.
Waney timber beams and panelling, exposed concrete walls and barn and cottage doors, it has contemporary features that make it a cut above.
