One of the goats has blood running down her face. She bleats piteously and lets me take a look at her head. She has only one horn left. "Oh my God," I think. "What do you do with a goat with a bloody hole in the top of its head?" Maybe a strimmer would have been a better idea to tame the wilderness - but borrowing three goats seemed an easier option. Panicking, I ring the goats' owners. No answer. But nature is a wonderful thing and a day later the hole seems to have healed. By the time I get hold of the owners - who assure me it is a normal event, like children losing their milk teeth -- Frieda is looking her usual inquisitive self.
"I have the house for you," said the auctioneer in Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon, before taking me to a traditional cottage "in need of modernisation". I fell in love with its crooked walls, overgrown lane and wild garden with big old trees - as well as the stone outbuildings, the big red barn and, best of all, the ruined cottage tucked behind.
Love is blind - so I didn't really see the water running down the walls and seeping up through the floor, the leaking kitchen roof and the huge amount of work ahead. Two years later, I understand why more experienced friends looked at me with pity and the bank manager advised me to buy a new bungalow. "Great potential," said my visitors. "You're very brave." What were they talking about? How hard could fixing up a house be? After all, it had only been empty for two years and already had a kitchen, bathroom, electricity and a septic tank.
After renting a flat in Dublin, I knew almost nothing about houses, gardens, renovation, construction or the countryside. I didn't know that every job would take much longer than I imagined, that everything would cost much more than I estimated, that I would one day enjoy conversations about septic tanks, drainage ditches and compost heaps or that I would own a trailer, a cement mixer and enough tools to build a whole housing estate.
Neither did I know the joys of waking to the cuckoo; watching new leaves appear on my trees; collecting blackberries or the comfort of a big fire of logs. And there are other advantages to country life.
People have more time to chat and call round for a cup of tea (compared to a social life in Dublin arranged weeks ahead by e-mail and voice-mail). Even shopping here is a pleasant experience. Buying tools or materials in Dublin involves traffic jams, difficulty in parking and, more often than not, surly shop assistants with no specialist knowledge. My local shops in Ballaghaderreen are staffed by friendly, knowledgeable, helpful people - from Mulligans hardware where I can have a pint and a chat after the hard business of buying paint, a sickle, buckets, an oil lamp and a mushroom kit to Maddens builders providers where two men spend 20 minutes helping me to work out how much wood I need for a ceiling and then another 20 minutes tying it to the roof of my car.
My pre-Famine cottage comes back slowly to its original glory. Working mainly with friends, who luckily include a plumber, a builder and a roofer, with breaks for winter, progress is slow - but more satisfying than employing strangers. Water is the enemy -- and outwitting it takes up time, energy and money and all there is to show for it (fingers crossed, as rain hammers on the tin roof) is an absence of the stuff. At six o'clock one dark autumn morning, I stepped out of bed into six inches of water - the old well 50 feet up the lane had overflowed and water was pouring through my bedroom walls. "Sell," was my first thought, as I struggled through torrential rain to dig a new channel for the water streaming through the stone walls and build a dam of sand to persuade it away from the building. But big fires and a mop soon cleared it up.
The only reliable weapon in the water battle is drainage, I was assured by the experts in the pub. So I rented a mini-digger for a friend to dig ditches around the cottage, to be filled with a pipe and drainage stones and channel water away from the walls. He was like a kid with a new toy - until the digger went though the water mains. A fountain of water turned into a river which, blocked by a huge pile of small, round, drainage stones, threatened to enter the house by the front door. As rain poured, we frantically shovelled at the pile of stones to create a channel past the door. Then I phoned my friendly local plumber and leapt into the car to find the man who could turn off the water on the road. "Sell," I thought to myself. The first job inside was to restore the two-and-a-half foot thick walls. Mouldy, peeling wallpaper covered a spongy six-inch layer of lime plaster over stones held together with wet mud. All this had to come off and slowly a mountain of wet plaster and mud grew in the garden. After the stones were re-pointed, it was decision time: go for the quicker, easier option and put up plaster board, creating the angular look of a modern bungalow, or re-render following the contours of the stones, creating soft, curved walls more like the inside of a cave than a house? I decided to go for the traditional look - a labour-intensive job involving coating the walls with a lime-based plaster, then a skim coat, and finally sanding before painting.
The floor comprised a thin layer of cracked concrete over stones, daub and puddles of water (that leaking well again). Digging it out added more mud and rocks to the mountain in the garden, but the drainage ditches and a new concrete floor, now covered in ceramic tiles, will keep out the persistent enemy. A local tractor driver who came to look at the mud mountain threatening to engulf the house estimated renting skips to remove it would cost about £1,000. So instead, he spread it over an area under trees which may, one day, become a car-park. Bemused by the restoration project, he pointed out that the only way to straighten the crooked exterior walls was to knock them down and put in breeze blocks. I invited him inside to see the cave-like living room walls, with not a level surface in sight. He was speechless.
Planning the work is like playing a complicated game of dominoes. We can't render the chimneybreast in the living room until the ceiling comes down; we can't take the ceiling down until the water tank in the attic is moved; we can't move the water tank until there is somewhere to put it; so we have to build the sleeping platform in the main bedroom (which had originally been planned for what I optimistically call phase two) to move it to. So months of work commence - which expands to include the insulation and wooden panelling of the livingroom ceiling (also part of phase two, if not three) - all because the chimney has to be rendered. But now I have an extra room, the loft - although I recently did a bad Lara Croft impression when the (temporary) precarious step ladders leading up to the new bedroom slipped.
As for DIY programmes on TV, I watch them all, even though they are more likely to show how to install a high-tech kitchen than how to put up gutters on a crooked house. And as for garden programmes - I'm hooked. I even watch that perennial favourite, how to create a wilderness garden, when my problem is the exact opposite. Although the goats keep down the nettles, thistles, long grass and rushes, the garden (two-thirds of an acre) is a mess which I don't have the time or the expertise to deal with. After feeble efforts to reclaim small patches for flowers and herbs, so little grew last year that I have resorted mostly to pots this year. I dream of old-fashioned climbing roses over the door but am the ultimate suburban gardener - my success stories are geraniums, sweet williams and nasturtiums. (If there was a competition for the smallest lettuce in the world, I would win).
The house is easier; every week brings another surprise. The most exciting discovery was when a friend attacked the 1950s redbrick fireplace with a pickaxe to reveal a walk-in stone fireplace, complete with a crane for holding pots. Since it was too big for a fire (how did people in the past live with all that smoke in the house?) we put in a 1950s range to run radiators. Beneath the plaster in one livingroom wall I discover three recesses - maybe used for drying turf or keeping food cool? In the ruins, I find old farm equipment, bottles, old newspapers, rusty cast-iron pots and kettles, wooden-soled shoes and the remains of an accordion.
Many of the closest houses are now ruined and history is all around. Locals tell me that the cottage, always lived in by the same family, was a popular place for sessions (one of the recent owners was a fiddle player) and on the bus from Dublin one day, I met a man who used to cycle 10 miles here for the music. The last owner, one of the daughters of the family, who had feared I would demolish the cottage, visits occasionally and seems to like the changes - she was as surprised as I was to see the old fireplace.
After two years, phase one (drainage, walls, ceilings, floor and doors) is almost finished and phase two (an organic vegetable garden, a kitchen extension and a thatch roof), phase three (turn the stone outbuildings into a self-contained cottage) and phase four (restore the ancient cottage) are well underway in my dreams. Maybe professional builders would have done it all differently - but given the difficulty in finding anyone to put up a shelf these days, it seems unlikely I would have got anyone to work for less than the price of the house itself - and the satisfaction of doing the work with help and advice from friends is immeasurable. Sell? Never.
smarriott@irish-times.ie
