Plumbing first fix is choosing where your water, waste, and heating system pipes go. In order to do this, you need to know where your toilets, sinks, showers, dishwasher, washing machines, underfloor heating, etc will eventually be situated in your house. It involves pre-planning and we thought we’d pre-planned! You know that feeling when you […]

When lighting what some might call was your ‘standard’ home, people tend to believe that there is no need to pay for the services of a lighting designer. However, and of course, we tend to differ! So what value do we bring to a standard home that warrants paying for the service of a lighting […]

I don’t know why exactly but I’ve always had a love for real wood floors so I did feel this was the way we would eventually go even before we went looking. When we bought our cottage, the first things I invested in were teak parquet flooring and a cast iron bath! Both of which […]

I never placed any importance on windows until it came time to start choosing my own – for a while there it was pretty much all I could think about! After spending so much time living in our dark, pokey cottage before beginning the design, we knew windows would be central to opening up the […]

When it came to our finances, we were novices. We got our original mortgage from BOI when we bought our home, not the easiest process as it was in 2014 but from anecdotal evidence, it was easier than it is now. I’ll never forget meeting BOI’s Life Assurance department and being sold a selection of […]

My husband and I had always thought we would build, we had land in our sights and had even engaged an architect. But one evening, Donal called me over to look at Daft, and there it was, our future. A small cottage down the end of a treelined lane in north Kilkenny. We fell in […]