It is customary for me to sit at my kitchen table, looking out into the garden and dream about the possibilities of what I could do to my house if I won the Lotto.
I have mentally redesigned the interiors hundreds of times, I have constructed elaborate extensions, which would double, even treble the size of the living space – only to come back to the sad reality that winning the Lotto is an impossibility as I don’t actually play it, and besides (with all the day-dreaming) I struggle to maintain and clean the space I have now. I certainly would not have the time to procrastinate as I do now, if I had a bigger house.
It occurred to me one day as I found myself on the wrong side of forty five, my work as an interior designer impacted upon by the construction implosion in Ireland, that I might need to invest in my future and look for alternative source of income. And that my home could possibly provide the pension fund that I had not made provision for…
Once my children were to move on (a sad inevitability that I am already struggling with, even though the youngest is only 13!) I could let out a room or foster a wayward teenager. But on clear reflection, given the price of renting or buying , my children may never leave and the plan B of fostering when they are eventually gone may render me too old to qualify, and given my own experience with less than wayward teenagers, I do not want to leave it until I am too long in the tooth.
So that got me thinking, that if all else fails… I could build an extra room, so that I could start earning an income from my house!
However,
I do not have the funds or borrowing capacity to build….. Hence I got to thinking… could I build an extension with no money or maybe for under 5000 euro????
And so I find myself here in this virtual reality, putting my quest out to the universe and Hey the universe has responded…
I walk the hills with a man called Mark, whose daughter had recently graduated as an architect. She was one of the very few in her class who went into a job straight after her studies, so I thought it safe to ask her if she could recommend someone out of her class, who might have an interest in social media and working with me on this project. I met young Emma Byrne and she immediately responded positively to my thoughts and suggested she and her colleagues Fiona Nulty and Aisling O’Sullivan would be interested in joining my team and take on the architectural design.
Since meeting them, they have launched into the project wholeheartedly. they have done trojan work, surveying the site, drawing up plans. collecting source material and not least drawing up some wonderful ideas, all of which I will share with you…
The 5kextension 