Not Mark Lomas and his girlfriend Heather Thomas, who came here from Britain in 1998 to build their own home — and did exactly that. Although it has taken them eight years to finish it — from designs sketched on the back of envelopes and much discussion during nights spent in the caravan they occupied as they planned it — it was all fashioned and installed by Lomas, a carpenter by trade.
A decade ago, Mark, from Yorkshire, and Heather, from Cornwall, were reluctantly stuck in the rat race. Lomas was working hard on building sites, Thomas was involved in a business providing trained animal actors.
Mark recalls: “We were living in Kent, one of the most overpopulated parts of the UK, crippled with a mortgage with interest rates of 15%, car repayments, big bills, late hours, no life. One day Heather said: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could go somewhere and build our own house and live without a mortgage?’” The couple saw an ad in a magazine for sites in Clare. They’d heard about the beauty of the west coast and the cheapness of land there. They headed to Clare for a weekend and bought the 3.25-acre site they now occupy at Derrynaneal near Feakle. “We looked at three sites, and when we saw this one, with woods around it and a river running alongside, we just thought, ‘Wow’, and bought it. For the first four years, though, we had to live in a caravan.”
As committed ecologists, the couple had big plans for the site. They wanted to become as self-sufficient as possible, growing and rearing their own food and setting up a reed-bed sewage system.
With the aid of a polytunnel, the first part of their plan fell into place quickly enough. “At the height of our growing, we had new potatoes, cabbages, onions, kale, berries and all that the polytunnel allowed including tomatoes, cucumbers and even chillies.” The couple also raised their own livestock.
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Mark had attended a course in self-building and adhered to the simple but widely acclaimed method pioneered by Walter Segal, which promotes timber frame construction supported by a series of concrete piles or posts made by pouring it into bores in the ground.
“It was quite difficult at first because timber frame was unusual in Ireland then. The planners weren’t too familiar with some of the methods we were using and many materials we required couldn’t be got here at all. For a lot of the stuff we needed, we had to send away to Germany and Sweden.”
“It took us quite a while to come up with the design,” says Heather. “We had a good idea what we wanted. We knew we wanted an ecologically sound and proven design with as much natural light as possible because Ireland tends to get quite dark at some times of the year. I knew with all our home-grown produce we’d need a proper walk-in larder to store it in. We knew we wanted our home to be based around a traditional-style kitchen/dining room and living room.”
And so the kitchen ended up with optimum lighting levels thanks to the double-height windows, which by their slightly gothic formation lend it the look of a church gable window. “It wasn’t intentional, but it works,” adds Heather.
The bedrooms are facing east to take advantage of morning light, the heavily insulated larder, with its small window to let in cool night air and not burglars, faces north to add to its naturally refrigerative capacity. The sun room, kitchen and main living spaces face west and employ the largest windows possible. This, along with the wood-burning heating system, means that the house is almost free to heat. “We haven’t had the heating on since April,” says Mark.
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Through his job as a carpenter Mark had considerable experience with other aspects of the construction trade. “I wouldn’t recommend that you go so far into self-build without some sort of basic knowledge, not only of the different trades, but also of how they come together in the construction of a home.
“You’ll find that a lot of site foremen are carpenters because they’re the glue between many of the other trades — the bricklayers, the electricians, the plumbers and plasterers all consult with the carpenters.”
A fan of the popular Grand Designs TV series, Mark doesn’t believe it presents an accurate picture of what building your own home is about. “They quite obviously pick these people because they’re going to make a mess of it. Just because you’re a manager in an office doesn’t mean you’ll make a good manager on a building site. Unlike the people they tend to feature, we weren’t building to a deadline. We’d achieved what we wanted to do and had completely dumped our mortgage. We were concentrating on getting our home right and we’d do it in our own time.”
While Mark did the bulk of the plumbing and electrics himself, he did, however, call in experts to do the more dangerous jobs. “I called in the plumber to install the boiler — you just can’t take risks with that sort of thing.”
In these days of soaring gas, oil and electricity bill, the couple’s house was way ahead of its time with the wood-burning system. “We’ve got two-and-a- half acres of copse out there which reproduces itself over the years. Some of our land is also bog with turf banks, which we haven’t had to get stuck into, but would also provide a source of free fuel. Because of the house’s high insulation qualities and optimum use of passive solar power (windows) we don’t need much heating.”
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However, building the house did not come without its cost. Mark has slipped three discs in his back in the past few years and now believes he cannot continue with the physical end of carpentry. As a result, he’s heading back to the UK to enrol in a three-year degree course in housing design, while Heather seeks to further her own career as a hunt guide.
The property is now for sale through Green Valley Properties and Steve Symes, the agent who sold them the site in the first place back in 1998.
Located 3.5km from Feakle and 22km from Ennis, it’s quiet without being isolated. The house comes with a hall entrance, a walk-in larder, kitchen/dining room, a sun room, three bedrooms, a gallery studio and two bathrooms. Water is from their own well, the sewage is processed by the reed-bed system and the garden comes with various raised beds, the polytunnel, a large woodland copse and wildlife bogland areas that are now protected.
A good amount of bespoke handmade furniture also comes with the property, which is for sale for €375,000.
Mark concludes: “Thanks to people like Duncan Stewart, Ireland has become aware of the methods and technologies we have employed.
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“Timber frame is now common all over Ireland now and reed-bed sewage is widely known, heat plant is available and wood-burning heat systems are in common use.”
It’s nice to be ahead of your time.
Green Valley Properties 061 921498, www.gvp.ie