Room to Improve (v2)

They made a big deal about having dual bathrooms to avoid cross contamination, so it appears that the people with CF will be staying in the apartments at some stage, perhaps when accessing day services at the hospitals.

The price of the house isn't really the issue for me, we all know property prices are mental.

However after having a child that was in and out of hospital (thankfully I live in Dublin with good public transport connections so we could do 1 night in the chair 1 night at home between the pair of us) I have a fair idea of what my priorities would be.

Period house with sash windows, cornices and fancy ceiling roses absolutely not.....so I don't see the value of paying over the odds for a 20 year vacant property.......I was half expecting Hugh Wallace to make a grand entrance at one stage (we would have had a hat trick then: room to improve meets diy sos meets great house revival)

I'm not allergic to stairs but having to drag a buggy up a flight of stairs before even getting in the hall door....no!

A nice easy access front door with maybe a "parking" area for a pram so you don't need to bring it into the apartments especially if you have to go upstairs to the apartment.

Easy to clean functional furniture....there's no need for 500 scatter cushions. The big fabric headboards are also a no from me. I'm not looking for a hotel experience.

Location: I'm not overly familiar with the Southside being a Northsider , so I can't really comment on bus /luas/ dart routes to hospitals, but I would expect the property to have easy access to public transport we all know the cost of hospital parking if you get a spot and there's very little parking around crumlin and Temple Street without a walk....however if I was staying in one of these properties I'd want to me close enough to a decent supermarket to pick up basics....even just for the mental break of a walk to the shops etc.

Then of course parking, you don't want to be stressing about where you are parking your car....if you are coming back late at night you don't want to have to park miles away.

I'm really surprised there was not even a blue badge parking spot.....but then this property is completely unsuitable for anyone in need of a blue badge.

Seeing a waste of funding just absolutely annoys me …yes I know he raised it.... however more families could have been helped if the spending was different.

Is Dermot a conservation architect? Am I confused but wouldn't such a property require a conservation architect for the renovations.

We live close by and when we were looking for a house we ran a mile from any that were listed and required a conservation architect - money pit imo.

The house has charm and think Julian etc. got swallowed up in that. It is close to Rathmines for shops, amenities etc but a good walk from the green Luas (which is only useful if you want to go into town or Sandyford).

But look - he got a result. Easy to do a post-mortem and say that he'd be better off with a few purpose build apartments in a less salubrious area etc.

Don't think it was listed. Personal choice not to destroy the fabric and retain as many features as possible.

All the room to improve programs are on the rte player going back years .

Terrible value for money but that's to be expected from any of these charities tbh. Most of them seem to exist as hobby horses for the bored stay-at-home mothers of South Dublin once the kids are in school (or more cynically a means of them "earning" six figure salaries).

The interior designer seemed a bit of a dose and totally unnecessary when there was a qualified architect on board.

Fair play to all the trades and suppliers for their generosity but it seems a disservice to that generosity that so little was achieved from such a huge "budget".

I’m glad people get the house designs they think they want or like & I wish them all many happy years in their homes while I get a little bit of easy viewing before bedtime on a Sunday evening. There are many different choices I might make but the same would be true in most of the houses of my family & friends & I have to assume the same when they come to my house.

Julian Benson has CF & as we saw, some of the complications that accompany it. He also felt obliged to keep a promise to his mother. Presumably when he considered what form that might take, he saw a house such as the one bought & families benefitting from it. He mentioned wishing his mother had had a similar option during his hospitalisations.

I don’t know Julian Benson but he seems a nice person who wanted to do a nice thing for people in a predicament he understands.

While I also don’t know anything about being a parent of a child with CF, I do know what it’s like to be a parent of a small child who had multiple hospitalisations over an eighteen month period while also being the parent of a smaller child who was a little too young to understand much more than the displacement he experienced while the rest of the family went off on what he might have thought was some kind of jolly, leaving him with extended family.

Would we have welcomed somewhere like this house that didn’t look or feel like a hospital, somewhere we could get a glimpse of what normal might be like? I think we would. I’m sure there are things we would all have done differently, quicker, better, cheaper but Julian Benson did something & I think he’s to be applauded.

I was quoted for 5 medium sized sash windows (about half the size of those in that Rathgar house!) - anywhere between 10 and 14 grand - that included fixing up of the sashes, re-weighting them etc

I expect a bit of manufactured drama from Room to Improve but this episode was packed full of it to such a degree it was just a constant flow of contrived nonsensical moments.

The initial budget & cost estimate; Dermot at pains to say how surprised he was. Absolute nonsense. Every Architect knows a ball park cost X/m2 for differing build type. He'd have taken one look at the property and known the costs within +/- 20%.

The budget gap drama - this whole "we'll pull up our boot straps and beg borrow and steal to make it happen" is the sort of codology American TV shows portray and lap up. They didn't delve in to the overall budget in much detail after that.

There was so little of the actual build covered having it on 'Room to Improve' was pointless; more suited to a DIY SOS type show where it's more focussed on the people and Cystic Fibrosis. Restoring old sash windows and cornices are in no way relevant to the provision of accommodation of this type. It just smacked of the RTE in-house circuit being spun out.

I have (thankfully) no experience of what a parents & children of CF go through; those families could & should have had a more vocal part of it. Having those involved in the charity itself did them no favours with me personally.

https://jbcff.com/our-mission/#house

"Our mission is to develop an accommodation facility in Dublin where a family member can stay, whilst their loved one is receiving treatment in hospital. It is usual for CF warriors to be hospitalised for extended periods. This means many Irish families are doing a roundtrip, daily commute from all over Ireland to St. Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin- The National Referral Hospital for Cystic Fibrosis and other Dublin hospitals.

This is a crucial facility for parents, spouses, siblings and the children of a CF warrior, at a most vulnerable time of stress and worry. This accommodation will allow family members to be close to the hospital, enabling them to spend precious quality time with their families."

So doesnt look like CF sufferers will be staying in the house at all.

Presumably because if the various units were sharing a bathroom it could multiply the complications of one guest in the house visiting a hospitalised family member whilst sick into four vulnerable patients being exposed to any virus/pathogen they had.

To be honest I'd have more of an issue if each unit didn't have their own bathroom.

These are lovely self contained apartments, a home away from home as such......it's not hostel accommodation.

Personally I wouldn't like to be sharing a bathroom with another family especially if young children are involved. (Obviously if you had to you just get on with it)

However own bathroom facilities would be much higher on my list of priorities than period features.

Nothing to do with begrudgery, just fed up of so many charitable causes being taken advantage of by those looking to feed their own ego or bank balance.

I'm not having a go at Julian Benson here as he clearly put his heart and soul into this project but I do question why he didn't approach CF Ireland with the project instead of spinning up another charity (with all the additional expenses of that - including hiring the CEO who appeard on the show). Perhaps he did and they (rightly) pointed out that spending €1.4m on a period property in one of Dublin's more expensive neighbourhoods that was in need of another €2m or so worth of renovations wasn't an optimal use of resources?

The latest audited accounts for his foundation are from 2023 so they don't detail the renovation costs or the new CEO's salary (though interestingly they do highlight that a certain Eoghan McDermott stepped down as a director during that year).

While none of the figures provided for administration expenses appear excessive, they do exceed the donations received by the foundation. Had this project been carried out under the auspices of an already existing charity (such as CF Ireland), those expenses should have been far lower due to economies of scale and the elimination of duplication and Benson's fundraising efforts could have resulted in a development that could have helped even more families.