Cheap Irish houses

It's TV, to a certain extent you have to suspend your disbelief.

The problem is that it ties you to your job, or at least makes it more difficult to change jobs when you away from the center of things, but lots of people make it work and wouldnt swap it .

I liked the house in Tyrellstown pass (SP) I'd happily move into that.

The second farmhouse, seriously unless you got a team in and left them to it, which would be seriously cha-ching you'd be giving up your weekends for the next few years trying to right it and it would still cost a pretty penny. Those fixer upper houses you need to have abit of Dick Strawbridge in you and be able to turn your hand at anything otherwise your heart would be broke.

Last house was grand abit far from Dublin though.

Most of the people that appear on this show have no renovation experience or knowledge. They have no idea whats involved in getting the houses to livable condition. They seem to be chasing this country living dream. The guy ' engineer/architect' never gives a true opinion on the work that needs to be done and costs involved. There seems to be alot of single women who appear on the show - I dont know how derilect houses in the middle of nowhere ( in areas where they know nobody )would be in anyway suitable for them ( and I say this as a female). All seem to be on very low incomes and renovations budgets aswell so investing in money pits where there is no market to resell a few years down the line is a really bad investment.

As regards Maggies visits to the 'finished renovations' - they are pointless. The owner of the house shown in the last episode was involved in construction - thats the only reason they were able to do it for €55K ( I dont even think they were being honest with the €55k). Plus it was also a very small house.

In the last episode the lady was shown houses in Tipperary. When you look up houses for sale in Tipperary there are many houses in great condition for even less than what Maggie showed this lady.

Ive also noticed that Maggie seems to only focus on certain counties in the country ( counties close to where Maggie lives)- she seems to ignore Leitrim where there is good value in terms of housing. Could it be that Maggie also offers a service where she helps or project manages the renovations should anyone be foolish enough to go for the houses?

Dont get me wrong this is a great idea for a show but the show is actually done very badly in that the people are never made aware of what the true costs could work out to be to renovate these properties

I think the reality is that a lot of these houses could be made "habitable" for reasonable money and with what you'd be saving on the difference between Dublin rents and a small mortgage you could save enough to do a proper renovation on them after a few years of living like our parents and grandparents generations did (i.e. with little insulation, draughts, interiors that wouldn't exactly be Instagram friendly etc.

We've kind of done something like this ourselves tbh: we bought a 4 bed terrace in North County Dublin for 230k a little over 5 years ago that was built in the 20s or 30s and which was totally wrecked inside. Over the course of the first year we got a new condenser boiler fitted, removed and re-placed some boast plaster from a couple of rooms, tiled the kitchen and utility room and installed new kitchen units in both (an IKEA DIY job for the utility), did up the bathroom (with a suite I got for free or next to it on adverts), replaced the flooring in the rooms where you couldn't live with what was there, replaced a few radiators etc. and then paint, polyfilla and hours of work got the rest done. The whole lot came to a little over 30k over the first 6 months we were here. Since then I've done the front and back gardens up for very little (basically labour, paint and the price of a skip, some compost and seeds/seedlings etc).

There's still a lot I plan to do to the place over the next few years (gut a downstairs bathroom, replace the early 90's double-glazing and uPvc front door which are well past their expected life-span, upgrade the insulation, replace the laminate flooring we inherited in some of the bedrooms but couldn't afford to replace at the time, put in a decent shed/workshop and a load of other little things (or more major changes I'd make if I could afford a full move out and get the builders in for a few months job) but, sure, I enjoy DIY and it makes Mrs Sleepy happy to "rescue" the old place.

It'll never compare to a new build in terms of energy efficiency (or some would argue finish but we like a bit of "character"!) and I'll be kept busy for years getting it "perfect" but it's a warm, comfortable home for my family. It's saved us an absolute fortune compared to what we'd have spent on rent in that time while the work we've done to date more than paid for itself: when we got it valued for a change in our mortgage LTV rate a year after we moved in it had appreciated in value by over twice what I'd spent on the refurb. I'd say there's another thirty or forty grand worth of work I want to do over the next 3/4 years but that's sort of the point: once the bones of a house are good, you can get it habitable fairly quickly and affordably. It might be another 10 years and hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of DIY (and/or thousands spent on trades) over that time before it's a "dream home" or remotely comparable to modern building spec but if you don't have the budget to buy the dream house, you buy what you can afford.

It was 5 years ago when we paid that for it and being a 4 bed might give the impression that the house is larger than it is: it's only a little over 1000sqft: every other house on the terrace is configured as a 3 bed. Still, you're right that you'd probably need closer to 300k for an equivalent property in 2021.

I think the point I was making still stands though: an 100k house as shown on this program might need major work costing more than that again to bring it up to meet modern building regulations but quite a few of them can be made perfectly liveable for relatively small money. While ideally from a climate change POV we'd all live in passive houses, the reality is that most of us can't afford to spend tens of thousands on upgrades that often have a payback period measured in decades.

Cheap TV, doesn't require much effort to watch. Feeds a dream.

They need to visit some of these people a year or two later to see how their dream of moving to the country came true (or not).