We all know how hard it is to be able to buy and call a place your own; for buyers doing it by themselves, making the sums stack up is that bit harder.
And it’s not just about buying your own home: the dream of upgrading and adding your own personal touches often requires a practical approach, and will probably take longer than you’d hoped.
Real life is different from the reels of social feeds, where a 15-second video online shows work that took months to complete with very little of the slog and financial despair that went into the end result.
Two first-time buyers, both pragmatists, tell their stories, explaining how they managed to get the keys to their own places – and what still needs to be done.
A surprise find in Dublin 8
Thirtysomething Eleanore Hutch, who works in marketing, got more than she bargained for when she bought her two-up, two-down terraced house in Inchicore.
“I found a gun in the attic, a Lee Enfield rifle,” she says, referring to the standard service weapon of British armed forces during the colonial era. While it makes a great icebreaker story to recount over dinner, it isn’t on display in the colourful home she has designed for herself. So what did she do with it? She brought it to the local Garda station. The officer in charge didn’t ask her any questions and she doesn’t know what became of it.
To save for the purchase, Eleanore moved back in with her mother for 2½ years, before buying the house in August 2022. Probate, however, didn’t come through until the following March.
The delay gave her time to process a vacant home grant, and by the time it came through, she had a builder who was ready to start.
She took on the renovation project separately, project-managing the subcontractors and paying on a job-by-job basis, including insulating the exterior walls.
The house needed work, including rewiring. “There were burn marks on the plugs,” she recalls. It also needed to be replumbed.
The works brought the house from a G Ber rating, the worst kind there is, up to a D1.
The 68sq metre (731sq ft) house had opened into a very small hall, with glass panelling dividing the stairs from the front room. Removing this helped bring light into the space, so the front door now opens directly into the room.
She kept the polished stone fireplace and put up timber shelving with scalloped edges, inspired by an idea she saw on Etsy. She painted the walls in a deeply pigmented shade, Blue Pearl, from Paint and Paper Library, that’s been teamed with a gold velveteen sofa from DFS. “It had good back-to-waist ratio and a good back height,” she says.
All told, she removed three doors from the ground floor to create a greater sense of flow, from the front to the back.
By installing skylights to both kitchen and bathroom, each enjoys more daylight. In the latter, she took out the existing bath, plumping for a large shower stall instead and reduced the width of the room by about 20cm.
This small change made a difference to the sense of space in the kitchen. As did the reconfiguring of its units.
New kitchen cabinetry in a dark design from Howdens looks stylish against the brick slip wallcovering that she found in Tilestyle.
The original back door was located in the utility room, a triangular-shaped second space off the kitchen, which meant you had to go through two rooms to get outdoors. A new door in the kitchen leads directly to the back garden.
For now, the utility room remains in its original condition and will be tackled only when she has more money to pay for the works.
Upstairs, the principal bedroom has a feature wall papered in Tibetan tiger print. She uses the second bedroom as a home office, and there is now an attic ladder to the loft space, where the gun was found.
“The garden is still awful,” she says. There are sheds in it that span the width of this surprisingly large space. She looked into renovating these, but all professional advice was to knock them down and start again from scratch – at a cost that is beyond her means for the next while. So, she’s taking a staggered approach and leaving it for now.
She paid €322,500 for the property two years ago, according to the property price register. The upgrading works cost an additional €70,000, she estimates, and she received about €25,000 through the vacant home grant.
“The vacant home grant was a huge, huge help for all the unexpected things, like a waste pipe in the bathroom that was damaged and added to the cost,” she says. “It did take a year for the grant money to come in. I had to borrow money from my mum to finish jobs.”
Adding personality through thrifting
For the first 18 months of her home-hunting journey, Chelsey Killen was looking in the second-hand market.
“I was a single-income buyer and looking at one-bedroom second-hand apartments, stretching to two where I could, but I was being outbid on every property.”
This was nearly 2½ years ago.
She says she compromised on location, casting her home-hunting net to include “everywhere south of the Liffey, across west Dublin and all the way to Arklow”, she recalls.
I thought second-hand was the only affordable option. New homes just weren’t on my radar. I thought of new homes as three- and four-bedroom residences on large estates that were for families.”
Chelsey had spent six to seven years saving solid for a deposit, working as a brand manager for Sherry FitzGerald, Ireland’s largest estate agency. Due to her job, however, she wasn’t allowed to buy a second-hand home from any of the branches, as this is against the estate agent’s staff policies. As a result, she wasn’t allowed to bid on many of the properties within her price bracket.
But there was an upside to this limitation.
“I had access to experts, and by being curious and asking questions, I also had access to mortgage brokers and their advice,” she says.
They counselled her to buy new.
“We’re allowed to buy new homes because the prices are fixed by a developer and there isn’t a bidding war.”
She subsequently searched high and low within Wicklow and Dublin for any new home within her price bracket. She had about €300,000 to spend, but using the First Home and Help to Buy schemes helped bridge the gap, getting her to about €400,000.
Seven months later she was picking up the keys to her new home in Altidore Gardens, Newtownmountkennedy, Co Wicklow.
As she bought off-plan, she’d never even seen the property before.
“There was no showhouse. It really was a gamble – after all the viewings and bidding – to decide over the phone. It was the fastest and biggest decision of my life.”
The upsides were that it had a brand new kitchen, and new appliances.
“The bathrooms were tiled. The bedrooms had wardrobes. The only thing I had to purchase urgently was a washing machine. All I needed was floors and a mattress to sleep on.”
Her savings obsession turned into a second-hand obsession for the house, she says, and she used the seven months before she got her keys to make purchases that cluttered up her rental.
She found a handmade bespoke couch in Second Chance in Wicklow town, that is grey in colour with black piping. She also shopped at Facebook Marketplace, where she found another couch. Other favourites included South Dublin Auctions, Le Zeitgeist in Phibsboro, Pete’s Antiques, Gaff Interiors and the Vision Ireland warehouse in Cherry Orchard.
