The house and property are officially mine now. Deed and property map has been signed… So exciting; also a little bit overwhelming. I cant wait to get started and see it start shaping up into an amazing little cottage. But before we go there… Let’s start at the beginning.
So one day in early August 2018, I was in Clogher, County Mayo, Ireland, staying in my cousin’s empty house which I had started renting. He lives nearby with his fiance, and he and I took a quick ride over to pick up his Mom, my aunt, to bring her back up to the house for dinner. On the way, he took a turn and I recognized from where he went that we must have been going to stop by his sheds on our way for some reason, and sure enough he pulled in to the driveway up at the top of the hill which leads to his sheds.
He parked the car facing this dilapidated little cottage that sits out in front of his sheds and his large fields beyond. So as we sat in the car looking at this tiny old cottage with a giant hole in the roof and another through the wall, (I had seen it many times before having been up to the sheds with him numerous times) I assumed we were there for him to check on a sheep or cow or some other errand that he had to do in the barn. But, as we sat there he started talking and was prefacing his comments with a few disclaimers. He started off, “…so this is just an idea… I was just thinking about it and it’s just a thought… and I wanted to see what you thought of it … when you were asking me about the prices of property around the area” (which I had been, just trying to get an idea) he continued, ” I realized that you were serious about maybe finding a place over here for yourself as a retirement place, or whatever…”
So I said, “yes, I am serious… just looking for the future, but I would love to do something like that.” So with that, he says, “well again, I’m just throwing it out there, but what about this place? It’s been in this condition for so long and I hate that it’s in such bad shape and always wanted to do something with it just to fix it up, but life being how it is I never seem to have the time at the right moment to be able to focus on it…. but if it’s something you were interested in, we could do it as a project. It would be fairly simple to fix up, it’s a very simple little place. I would divide the piece of property from mine, and you would have a house in Ireland… Right up the way from where your grandmother was born.”
Just down the hill down the road from this house is the site of my grandmother’s family house where she was born in 1909.
So that’s how it happened. I said YES before he was even done asking.
More fun facts about this piece of property: it is surrounded on 3 sides by family owned property. Immediately behind the house are my cousin’s “sheds” I mentioned. This is a very large barn with an adjacent smaller one with a workshop attached. So sheep and cows, lambs and calves galore.
I took this picture from my car. That’s the house with a few friends there in the foreground. I’m on the road here, so you can see it has a nice big front yard.
My Irish Farmhouse 