Staying put

Photography: Kirsty Lyons

Aoife and Mark Ryan lived in their home for years before they tackled their renovation project. The result? The family living space they dreamed of.

Overview

House size before: 123sqm

House size after: 146sqm

Bedrooms: 4

Original budget: €120k

Construction tender cost: €145k

Final cost, all inclusive: €185k

House value: €390k

Heating: gas boiler

Ventilation: humidity controlled

Build method (extension): blockwork

BER before: D1

BER after: A2

EXTENSION & RENOVATION

What do you do when you have a house that’s big enough for your family, in the right location, but is a nightmare to get around? Aoife and Mark Ryan’s answer was to stay put and reconfigure the space. But as is often the case, what started off as a modest refurb quickly snowballed into much more. “If you had looked at the original house it was three rooms across the back, living room/kitchen/utility, and we brought that whole space together and reconfigured some of the other rooms,” says Aoife. “One of us would be in the kitchen, one of us would be in the sitting room, the kids would be in the playroom.”

“And none of us could see each other. Reconfiguring it was a big thing and having a bit more space, adding a home office, and making it more comfortable for everybody was our ultimate goal,” adds Aoife. In addition to the reconfiguration, they added two small extensions, the one downstairs accommodates a new dining area; did an energy upgrade, including boiler upgrade; bought new appliances and new furniture; and got the whole house painted professionally.

The budget

As it turns out, when it came to the budget, Aoife and Mark had a leg up on other self-builders. “Mark is an accountant and I was working in sourcing at the time, so budgeting was our day job. So we were down to the cent, we knew exactly how much we could spend and stuck to our budget,” says Aoife.

“If we saved on one thing, we used that extra on something else, and we weren’t going to go over our full budget. We were quite restrained in that sense,” she adds. “Choosing the tiles and other finishings, you can definitely go really expensive for things like that so we had to be restrained. We had a budget for those kinds of things and for the construction as well.”

That’s not to say there weren’t any budget busters. “The one thing we hadn’t planned for was to get a painter in. That cost a lot more than we had intended or even thought about. I don’t even know if we thought we’d do it ourselves,” admits Aoife. “I think we hadn’t thought about it at all. Because there was so much fresh plaster, new woodwork, we got a painter in to do every single thing, inside and outside.”

“If you include the painter and all of the paint, it was close to €6k and he was here for about three weeks. At the same time, it was absolutely well spent. We would have spent months making a mess of it. The technique, base coats, woodwork, I wouldn’t know how to do all that.”

Helping to finance the build was the green mortgage they got from their bank,