My new Irish home is everything I was hoping to find.
I wanted a place that's:
- Full of character and has outbuildings
- Off the road and on a quiet road
- Has a beautiful garden with space for growing flowers and vegetables
- Has a nice outdoor area
- In a rural location but not more than 15 minutes from a large grocery store, bank etc...
- Close neighbors, but not where I can see them until I go out onto the road
- Lots of good walks
- In Southeast Ireland (where the weather is the most moderate, sunnier and dryer)
And I not only found all of that -- but I found it the morning after I arrived in Ireland!
I came over to Ireland from England on a ferry (I'm going to do an entry about that trip) on 5 January 2023 (I'm getting in the habit of the European way day/month/year 😃). I rented a vacation property for the first two weeks (another blog entry to come) thinking it would likely take weeks, if not months, for me to find my new home. But -- I had an appointment the next morning to see this place.
I've been looking at rental properties for several years and started seriously applying for places several weeks before I came over. I'd done a video tour of another house the week before I took the ferry over. It seemed very promising, but disappointingly the rooms were just too small and there were other things missing. So I was really hoping that I would like this house when I saw it in person, but I thought it very possible that it would be a disappointment too.
My vacation rental was about an hour away, so I got in the car early for a 10am appointment that next morning. There was lots of interest in the house from all over the world evidently, but my new landlords liked the idea of having one person living in the house I think, so I ended up having first choice.
It was a a big decision to make on the spot, but the location and the look of the place was so what I was looking for, I took the plunge.
The house is located in County Kilkenny (my first choice of location). I'm almost exactly in between New Ross, a town of about 8,000 people with a nice high street, a huge grocery store, and all the needs of life, and Waterford, a city of about 54,000 people. I'm about 15 minutes away from each. It's a great location.
The house has four bedrooms, one and half baths, two lounges, an eat-in kitchen and separate utility room. There are four outbuildings, including a one car garage and it's surrounded by farm buildings.
There's close neighbors (or neighbours as it's spelled here) but I can't see them until I go out onto the road.
The farm yard is all paved and there's a very pretty spiral laid stone patio in the front. The mature gardens are quite large and my landlord (who grew up in the house) has a landscape company, so he takes care of the garden!
The pink front door and the patio
The view from the house to the road
The left side of the drive and the back of the garage
The far right of the farm yard. The heating is by oil. You can see the tank. I had to order oil and the guy came with a huge truck to pump oil into the tank. I'm still getting used to oil heating. It doesn't run on a thermostat. It's off or it's on. I can program it to go off and on at certain times and there's radiators in each room, which I can turn off and on. The hot water is heated by the oil heater also. I'm still figuring out how the hot water works when the heat is no longer needed.
The garden outside the kitchen window.
THE KITCHEN
It's a big room but a small electric stove. I actually have more storage space than I have things. That rarely happens 😀
Lots of counter space
The refrigerator is smaller, but it's all refrigerator so it's probably as much cooling space as the regular American sized fridge. I have a large chest freezer in the utility room. This corner of the room is my tea station and the food pantries. Again an amazing amount of storage space.
This wonderful Emma Bridgewater art piece came from my friend Alison's kitchen in England. When she moved to her new house, there was no space for it. So I asked if I could have it. It's perfect on this wall.
The white counter on this side of the kitchen was a bit scarred up, so I covered it in black contact paper to match the stove, had the stove lifted a bit to match the height of the countertop and then got a bookcase and added a slate top to the other side to make a whole area. I brought my chickens from my LA kitchen. The window looks out over the utility room.
The kitchen has an old oil heated stove that unfortunately no longer works, but it's a fun display piece. All the tile was a bit much for me, and there were even some missing tile pieces, so...
I covered the face of it in black, with the pattern of the tile coming through. Then the colored tile on the inside really pops. I'm in the process now of finding display pieces at various heights around the stove.
This is what I've done so far. I'm still moving things around until I'm satisfied.
I added a black microwave and air fryer (best purchase ever!) and use the counter under the window for most of the food prep.
On my first day exploring further away than New Ross and Waterford and I found a wonderful pottery place that had this very fun tin chicken picture. I couldn't resist.
THE UTILITY ROOM
The back door enters right into the utility room. There's a full size chest freezer and the laundry area. It's very common here for there to only be a washer and for it to be in the kitchen. So it's a real luxury to have it in a separate room, and I added the dryer. It will be great to hang laundry outside when the weather allows, but it's nice to have the option of a dryer.
I bought the coat/shoe racks from Amazon and have my tools in the chest of drawers. The window at the end goes into the main lounge. There's a door just on the left that goes into the kitchen and a large window over the freezer that looks out into the farmyard.
I have two lounges.
And there's an small entry area with the front door.
Then it's up the stairs to all the bedrooms and main bathroom.
Floral carpet is very traditional here. Lots of the houses I saw on the real estate site had floral carpets, floral wallpaper and floral furniture covers. Fortunately I don't have quite so many things going on at once. The master bedroom is quite large and I have two large antique wardrobes that give me plenty of closet space. Very few houses here have closets. Even the new builds generally have wardrobes instead of closets.
The second bedroom is the main guestroom. It's L shaped and one whole wall is built-in wardrobes. It gets amazing light.
The wardrobes were my first major project. I scraped off five layers of wallpaper and then there was some mold. I got a mold spray (which worked amazingly well) and then painted everything with mold preventing paint. They turned out quite nicely in soft yellow.
The third bedroom is at the front of the house. It was another project there with the built in wardrobe. No mold this time, but getting rid of wallpaper and then painting it. I'm still waiting for some shelves to come in that I ordered from a local kitchen design place. It will become my 'hot press' which is what linen closets are called here.
It has an unfortunate fluorescent ceiling light, but check out the ceiling! Both this room and the hallway have these gorgeous wood ceilings.
Prior to paint
And now just waiting for shelves.
The bathroom is decent sized but pretty old fashioned. The tub is blue - I grew up with a turquoise tub, so not all that unfamiliar. And there's a power shower, which is quite common here. It heats the water as it comes through, which is great since the regular hot water is on the main heating system.
And the fourth bedroom is the smallest. I'll be converting it into my sewing room.
And that's the house.
THE COUNTRYSIDE
This is a beautiful country! Just driving anywhere, the countryside is heart-stoppingly beautiful. And it's wintertime! The trees are all bare but the grass is green and the overall feeling is lush and alive. It will be even more gorgeous when the trees leaf out again, but the tradeoff is that it will likely be less easy to see the views on some of the roads. There are lots of hedges and walls on the roads.
Most of the roads around me are basically one lane. When another car is coming the opposite way, each car has to pull to the outside of the road to make enough room. Sometimes, one of the cars has to back up to get to a wider spot in the road before there's enough space. And there's a lot of large farm machinery on the road that can be quite the surprise coming around a blind curve. You really have to be alert all the time.
I've been working on learning the roads without using the SatNav (what GPS is called here).
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