In the beginning...



Another Celic Tiger investment opportunity

Our search for a cottage in Ireland started out from a combination of family ties (her), an obsession with Irish traditional music (him) and a bit of naive optimism about 'investment potential' in the Celtic Tiger!. Towards the end of the property bubble we were as stunned as everyone else by the spiralling prices of million euro bog plots and reconciled ourselves to browsing Daft.ie for places we couldn't dream of affording. 

During 2008, as the economy began to slide, we took a more systematic approach and decided we'd buy somewhere if we could get it at the right price. At this point we had no fixed idea where we wanted to be - in the East where we had family or the West where we took our holidays...or just anywhere we could afford. We started browsing every cheap detached house or bugalow that came on the market across the country. It was time consuming but helped narrow down our options and preferences. We also made contact with various people who were generous with their advice and who would help us greatly later on.

We set ourselves an increasingly unlikely list of demands. We wanted a detached rural cottage but we wanted to be within an hour's drive of city civilisation (and an airport connected to the North of England). We wanted to be within a mile or two of a village with a general store and, ideally, a pub with great traditional music sessions. We wanted to be close to either the sea or the mountains (or both!) and preferably with a bit of a view. And we wanted all of it for a budget of €100,000...including structural renovation works!