Is our house-hunt in the city futile ?

. . . and is the answer in the countryside – where folk can build to suit themselves, by DON MORGAN

I’VE BEEN thinking about the houses we’ve looked at thus far. Most of them, sadly, have been awful. Some houses have about as much of a right to be deemed worth their asking prices as Sarah Palin has of being deemed a reasoned and intelligent stateswoman.

We’ve been looking for a house since the beginning of the year, but right now – and this could just be the awful weather making a drab place worse – maybe this house-hunt is utterly futile. We need to reassess what we want from a home.

Originally a three-bed semi seemed to be the answer. Why? Because there are more three-bed semis in Dublin than groupies at a Led Zeppelin gig, circa 1973.

Architecture in Dublin is, with notable exceptions, mediocre to the point that the skyline resembles someone’s mouth after a bare-knuckle fight. Dublin isn’t Paris and, as much as Rathmines church is the most whimsical and beautiful construction in the Big Smoke, where would you put your Aga – integrate it into the altar? And what’s the energy rating on a copper dome anyway?

Most houses we’ve seen have either been criminally overpriced or plainly unsuitable. The former problem is still pervasive, even as the punchline to the joke ‘what’s the difference between Iceland and Ireland’ comes to reveal its devastating self.

Don’t let anyone fool you: the market has not yet hit the bottom; you just need to haggle. Of the unsuitable homes, executor sales I’ve looked at have occasionally challenged my conscience. Some of our elderly, even in supposedly well-to-do areas, end their days in truly disgraceful squalor, and then their estates struggle to establish what’s an acceptable asking price for a house requiring modernisation, if not serious structural work. Some houses – damp, filthy – leave me feeling uneasy.

My wife’s family lives in a townland in south Kildare. To the uninitiated or unfamiliar, it’s a place as beautiful as it is melancholy: like The Shire minus Hobbits. It has back roads and boreens that could feature in the most Gothic of novels. It is an area of adventure and mystery where each sound and shadow is reflected in supernatural local folklore.

Two of my wife’s siblings have built on sites in the area and her parents have constructed their home in an evolutionary process lasting nearly half a century. The lesson is that a house can be tailored to your needs in terms of size, scale and purpose.

A city location offers a wealth of amenities, including schools within walking distance and public transport. In the country, what you lack in amenities you can compensate for in space. A mansion at half the price of a three-bed semi in Goatstown: sounds too good to be true? My fellow west Brits, get out of Dublin and look at what you can get with a small plot of land and a couple of diggers.

And for those of you who think this is not possible in Dublin, a city on the edge of urban tundra, look carefully and see how many people did just this during the boom. How many homes, even in the city centre, have been built that can challenge our perceptions of what a home should look like? The closer you look, the more you’ll find, with varying degrees of success.

We don’t know what to do. Maybe we should just up sticks and build a house to suit our needs. Maybe the answer is in the countryside after all, commute or no commute. While we look around and ask ourselves what we want for our money, we know that the difference between city living and country living is proximity to services and facilities.

Kildare is also far from work, and when work is hard to come by, you have to grab it with both hands and put in the hard graft.

The country life is enticing, and we could make a house suit us, as opposed to the other way around in Dublin. But as we consider our options, why is the ‘For Sale’ sign still up on the house my father-in-law saw– which we had been told was sold?