Turning an unloved house on a plot above a lake in Co. Cavan into a 172 square metre idyll, seeking €399,000
Address: The Lakekeeper's Lodge, Skeagh, Bailieborough, Co. Cavan, A82KD43
Asking price: €399,000
Agent: Keenan Auctioneers
“I was the only idiot at the auction,” when the gavel came down, says Original Irish Homes’ Lisa Carolan, of the Lakekeeper’s Lodge.
She's a veteran of the property auction format.
"I've looked at hundreds of title deeds and watched auctions. I'm on the property portals when others are looking at shoes."
She just bid once and held her nerve.
"If you meet the reserve, you automatically get the property. If nobody else bids within that timeframe, you automatically have it."
By the time the sale had timed out, she breathed a big sigh of relief, for she had already spent a month visiting the property, walking it and reading through every line of the legal documents.
Situated high on a bluff above a lough in Co. Cavan’s Lakelands, she bought the property in 2022, redesigned and reconfigured it.
She added a third bedroom. A new build, dating from 2008, also required planning retention.
She had trained as an RIBA architect at Queen's University, Belfast, but wanted a more hands-on job.
“I worked out halfway through the course that I couldn’t sit at a computer all day,” she explains.
She grew up with her single mother.
Money was tight. After she qualified, she spent 10 years saving to get the money to buy her first project, a retail unit on a back street in Ardee, Co. Louth.
“For the first renovation, I saved enough to buy the retail unit at auction and then got a €40,000 loan from the credit union, which really helped,” she explains.
“Their loaning criteria are less strict. It's extremely challenging to obtain a mortgage from a bank to renovate a house.
"Yes, the interest rate is high from the credit union, but once the work is complete and the house is livable, you can then look at getting a mortgage on it and use some of those funds to clear the credit union debt.”
She met her husband, engineer Jay Konijn, in the Netherlands, where they lived and worked.
They don’t work together in the business. She’s refreshingly honest about how she feels they would kill each other if they did, but crucially, when she needs him, he’s there.
When it came to finishing the work on the lodge on the lake, he used up all his holidays to help her get it onto the market.
Her father-in-law helped out too, travelling over from Holland to put his shoulder to the wheel.
This is Carolan’s fifth home renovation for sale. She’s not afraid of hard work or living in cramped conditions to get the job done.
She and Jay camped in one room in a house they lived in, in Holland, as they renovated it.
Even while at college, it had always been her hope to renovate homes for sale, but it was one she was slow to reveal to Jay.
“He never realised what my big dream was until we moved back to Ireland,” she says.
She understood the planning system and built up a good contacts list of tradespeople.
“Auctions are great places to get bargains,” she says, but there are many caveats.
“A solicitor has to look at the legal package supplied to see if the title is OK. You have to have your deposit ready, and you need to move quickly.
"Often, you only get about four weeks’ notice of the auction date. You also need to be able to afford to do the work.”
The three-bedroom, three-bathroom house has been transformed.
Extending to 172 square metres, it is also sizeable. Keenan Auctioneers is seeking €399,000 for the detached property, which has compelling water views.
It amounts to €2,319 per square metre, if it were to sell for its asking price.
Now C2 Ber-rated with electric underfloor heating warming its large-format, wood-look ceramic tiles via an air-to-air recovery system, it has a small office with a view, set to the right of the front door.
But the real selling point here is its walk-in condition and the expansive open plan living, kitchen, dining with painted panelled timber ceilings and a brick-surround fireplace that overlooks the water.
Above the fireplace is a timber beam mantel, supplied by Jay’s company Beam and Board, which sources reclaimed timber for roof, mantle, floor and other uses.
Lisa Carolan also undertakes design and planning for clients and can be contacted through Original Irish Homes
