I didn't say that specific house. I said the majority of what's been for sale in that range in D14 would take between €300-500k to modernise.
Try reading the post instead of strawmanning
No way it would cost within an 'asses roar' of €500k to modernise that house. Not a chance unless you were putting in gold toilets or building a large extension onto it.
500k to modernise is insane. The market is so screwed right now.
Having been house-hunting in that neck of the woods this time last year €1.1m for a 170m2 house needing a massive refurb is bang in the middle of market pricing. Anything of that size (and plenty without the garden space to take an extension) was over €1m 12 months ago, and based on the general age of the housing stock in D14 most would require anoher 300-500k to modernise them on top of that.
A great find for the thread.
Going to have a look at it later.
Paddy Moloney just went up a bit more in my estimation. Very understated house. National Geographic subscription and couldn't care less about 70 inch TV's.
Honestly I'd buy it in a heartbeat if I had the cash. I own a car with a very interesting history and a very well known previous owner. It gives me a nice tingle every time I get into it knowing who may or may not have sat in it.
That's absolutely beautiful, inside and out.
Paddy Moloney's house in Laragh Co. Wicklow on the market;
An hour up the road from Curracloe for @emeraldsky to have a look at.
A D2 BER and the pine cladding might be off-putting, but a nice house just the same, and great history.
Thank you so much for saying this! Very kind of you. :) My husband grew up in Ireland and is an Irish citizen; he has never felt the US was "home," and neither have I, to be honest. I've been to Ireland several times and there is nowhere else we'd rather live. I have Irish ancestry (I do know this doesn't technically make me Irish), and I have been fascinated with Ireland since I was a child, even though no one around me ever brought it up in any way. I'm sure some people will think of me as a "blow-in," and I am, but my husband isn't; he is just coming home. It's been a long time. A nasty estate agent isn't going to put him off returning home. :)
I genuinely appreciate your pointing these things out. As I said, neither my husband nor I know much about construction; we honestly did not know those pictures indicated problems. I can now see the wood is rotting along the roof edge, but I had no idea when we looked six months ago. I'm embarrassed to have been so naive. We've learned the hard way and I can now see those photos and recognise a problem, but we were babes in the woods six months ago. Neither of us had ever seriously looked at houses and so we were figuring out some things as we went along.
The Independent is more clear about the house's needing refurbishment, but the original listing said this: "The property requires a little updating but what a canvas to work on!" In the States, usually when a property needs "updating," it means cosmetic work instead of full-on refurbishment. It can certainly mean the latter, but US listings tend to be a little more clear about a property needing serious work. The phrase "fixer-upper" is often used in American listings, but it wasn't used here. :) My husband is an Irish citizen who grew up in Ireland, but we were both looking at listings through an American eye when we started. I especially still need help figuring out what some terms mean! :) I also thought the agent would be honest about what the house needed; happily the other agents we worked with were honest.
Asbestos isn't hard to remove, but, as you said, it does require money. At the end of our tour, spitballing with the estate agent, the bare minimum we came up with for all the work required on the house was around €300,000. The agent said there was no "wiggle room" on the price, so it was well over €1M for a house that we weren't particularly enthused about.
It really wasn't too bad in the end; as I said, we both got to see Wexford for the first time, and we loved it. Gorgeous city with so much fascinating history!
The add on daft has this:
Screams asbestos
Wood is clearly rotten here
Deck is also rotten, at what is probably the end of the fall, so whole thing needs replacing
And not to mention probable serious cold bridging here
it was the ad on DAFT that was linked to.
Photo 42 here ;
...........................................................................................
This gushing report in the Indo even has this Caveat Emptor;
"Over the years, Dominic has installed double glazing and a new kitchen and bathrooms, but says that although the house is structurally sound and has what he calls "a great footprint", it is now in need of refurbishment - particularly in terms of insulation to improve the BER, currently D2."
@emeraldsky For that money I'd expect the estate agent to walk you through the property with his phone camera, especially if they knew you were coming from abroad.
Yeah, it looks like common asbestos roof sheeting used around the time of construction. I would personally assume it's asbestos, question the estate agent about it, and get the response in writing.
The roof on it needs a good bit of repair, or even replacement. The bit of an extension on the side needs to be replaced too. What you are buying is little more than an expensive site that you are likely to get planning permission on.
I suspect that if a house isn't getting (m)any viewings, the agent may be under pressure to report some interest to the seller and try to keep the property on their books.
That price is ..... But love the house.. or rather the potential when/if someone made a HOME of it.
was there anything in the pics that suggested the roof contained asbestos?
I hope both you and your husband haven't been put off in looking for a property here, and that you find something you both love and get many years of enjoyment from.
You are right. I think the current owners bought it because they thought they could renovate it cheaply. The thing is though you can never renovate an old house cheaply - if you do it on the cheap there will always be problems.
I have a family member who bought an old cottage. She renovated it cheaply and badly that its now a mess. What once was a cute cottage is now a horrible house to live in due to shoddy cheap work. I dont think she could give it away let alone sell it! She is in a financial mess because of it.
I'm sorry if it comes across as poking. And I'm glad you got on ok with all the other houses. It can't be easy organising all that from abroad.
The house has glaring flaws in the photos they provided. If I had asked an estate agent about them, and they said they weren't a problem, then I'd know they were lying. So probably a lot more hidden things they'd lie about too.
I really don't understand estate agents that waste peoples time like this. As you say, an inspector/engineer's report will reveal these things. Maybe they are hoping for someone to offer lower than asking, given the work that needs to be done to it.
I've had to deal with asbestos in two houses myself, and isn't as difficult as some people think. Just costs money to have it dealt with expertly and disposed of correctly.
The black probably disguises mould. 😬😬
The black bathroom in that Kildare cottage is giving me flashbacks to school where the main bathroom was painted fully in black including the hand drier to deter graffiti on the walls. (Clearly they'd never heard of Tippex 😂) But no, black just sucks all of the light out of any room.
It looks as though they are treating the old stone walls by covering with non-lime plaster, which will blister and weep in a short period of time, the work they have done is pretty bad all round. I have come to the view that old cottages are way more trouble than they are worth. Far too many old cottages have been (pretty much) irrevocably damaged by generations of people adding inappropriate treatments. I have an old cottage that fortunately is only a small part of my house (its a useful storage area, but that's about all) and it has been cobbled about to an extent that it would be very expensive to make it a genuinely useful building again. Especially given the current impossibility of getting anyone to do any building work at the moment.
Estate agent language regarding the house above in Kildare. They say "30 second drive to Junction 14 of the M7"
It's 3.2 km. So to get there in 30 seconds you'd need to going around 380 km/h. It's a 3 min drive according to Google. We can all check it out, so why lie?
And IMO 3 mins sounds better than 30 seconds as 30 secs sounds like it's going to be near a busy junction.
We actually did consider hiring someone to vet places before we saw them, but we felt pretty confident that we'd done some good research. There should have been no need for us to hire someone to do this, anyway - what really should have happened is that THE ESTATE AGENT SHOULDN'T HAVE LIED. We wound up seeing something like 12 houses while we were there, and that was the only house that was a problem. The other estate agents were lovely (well, except for one, who gave us two hours to make a decision, but at least the information about the house was accurate). They answered our questions honestly and in detail, and the houses were great. I don't know what that agent thought he was doing - did he think we would be happy to discover that the house we just drove 5 hours one way to see had asbestos? Happy to discover that his assurances of "only cosmetic problems" were lies? Happy to have wasted an entire day on a house that was an absolute no-go? The icing on the cake is that he didn't even mention the asbestos until the end of the tour. My husband had asked at this point in time that, since the deck was falling apart (we were told to avoid certain steps, it was that bad), and the rest of the house had serious problems, was there truly nothing wrong with the roof? That's when the estate agent mentioned the asbestos. In retrospect, we should have just left sooner, but we'd just driven 5 hours and wanted to at least see the entire house and make sure we were making an informed decision. Sunk cost fallacy, probably. At least we got to see Wexford. :)
With every property we set up an appointment to see (we set up all appointments prior to leaving for Ireland), we specifically asked if the property looked true to the photos. We were flying ~12 hours, not including layovers, and we didn't want to waste any time while in country, so we were incredibly thorough in the questions we asked. You can guess what the agent said about this particular house ("Oh, yes, it looks great, just needs paint"). You still seem to be poking to find some reason to blame my husband and me for what happened, and you need to stop doing that. The estate agent is a liar, period. THAT is the problem, not anything my husband and I did or didn't do. Are you his cousin or something?
I'd considered leaving a Google review for him, but got distracted by the bustle of preparing for an international move. I might still do that. He is not a good estate agent.
About 4 or 5 years ago I picked up on the fact that EAs tended to describe any site under half an acre as 'half an acre', anything under an acre as 'an acre', and if it was actually approaching an acre as 'a generous acre', and so on, the descriptions of sites were totally unreliable, and at times outrageous. It was usually easy enough to check them on Land Direct, but it was so stupid that the descriptions were so useless.
I contacted the Property Services Regulatory Authority (PSRA) and pointed out that firstly the EAs were telling outright lies, and secondly this was bringing the service into disrepute because the lies were usually easy to disprove. I didn't get much of a response but shortly after I noticed that sites were being described in exact hectares as shown on the Land Direct site. Whether it was coincidence or I was just one of many complaints I don't know, but its worth contacting them.
I just scanned over your post actually. Have you thought about hiring someone to vet these places before you view them?
There's obvious alarm bells in the photos, that should have potential buyers asking questions. If the estate agent lied about them to you over the phone, then it should be picked up on. Never trust an estate agent!
I think you should leave the estate agent a full google review based on your experience.
The images shown in the recent listing are also use as far back as 2019, so no reason to think they couldn't be even older than that!
Maybe any future properties you are looking at, you could post here, and people can pick out stuff you may not have noticed.
Thank god the owners are selling it. They have done an awful job on the kitchen and bathroom. Its lucky they havent unleashed their interior design skills on the old cottage. As someone above said it's like 2 different houses. I love the cottage and it could be restored sympathetically it would be beautiful. The black and white kitchen area and bathroom also needs to be redone.
You're quite right - the layout was utterly bizarre! The only way for the very top part of the house (which seemed like a separate house) to access the rest of the house was via a narrow, dark, unlit spiral staircase. They don't show that in the listing, or they didn't when we looked back in March. It seemed as though they randomly added rooms here and there, and the flow through the house made no sense; it's hard to describe, and the listing photos do NOT depict the confusing layout very well. I really hope some people here go to see it for themselves - it's quite weird. My husband and I are not opposed to weird, but we are opposed to impractical, and that house is really impractical for the way we would use it. It would work well for separate groups of people who only want to interact occasionally, as it is basically 2 1/2 houses joined together, but even then it is not intelligently designed. It certainly remains vivid in my memory for how unusual it is! It will be the perfect house for someone out there, of that I've no doubt, but it wasn't for us. :)
