It was not without mistakes though so hopefully this helps someone else about to do the same thing…

• Get Masks – On Monday we did alot of carpet lifting and the dust and other rubbish that got thrown into the air was positively disgusting. However at the time we didn’t really notice. The next day however, I woke with and a headache and coughing. Not that bad but can easily be avoided!
• Get Good Gloves – Again, for carpet lifting. You’ll find with older houses that the carpets tend to be tacked down all the way around the room… And well that resulted in about very sore hands for me. My hands are covered in about 20 little cuts that are irritating to say the least. The gloves also help to keep your hands clean – an unappreciated benefit until you find out that some of the taps don’t technically… work.
• Get some Tools – This one I mostly had covered. A good hammer, chisel, crowbar and sledgehammer will get you out of most fixes. I also had hired a nice big steamer to take the wallpaper off the walls so that helped immensely. In fact, I would not have been able to do all the rooms without it. Forget all the other magic wallpaper removal techniques – Get a Steamer. Another tool that I can recommend is an angle grinder as there are many times when you’ll find it handy. I did, when I was trying to take the skirting boards off the walls without removing the radiators.

However the thing that helped the most? Getting Help!

Get Friends, Get Family, Get Help.

Luckily, I was helped in most of the jobs around the house by members of both families and friends that showed up to lend a hand. A few in particular were invaluable and I cant thank them enough. They were a great help in the early stages and enabled us to get rid of the skip out the front quickly as we were able to do all the big jobs quickly and mostly easier with more hands. One thing I can recomend is getting a few friends around early, with the lure of a couple of free drinks down the local. Everyone works like a trojan for half the day and then its off the pub for the match and a food and drink. That way you get maximum productivity and maximum time off! There’s nothing worse then knowing that there’s a good match on and your pulling out wardrobes on your own. Plus it’ll end up cheaper in the long run.

So, what’s on the agenda for next week? Well, we have a few builders lined up to come around and talk about extensions and our options. A friend who’s doing the electrics is also due, and a couple of other tradesmen are coming out to give us quotes and the like. Let’s hope its nice and cheap!

Just as an aside here – I really wouldn’t have gotten anywhere with this process without the help of my mortgage advisor with Bank Of Ireland on Camden street. They were really helpful and I can’t recommend them enough.

So besides all that, what else have I been doing? I just started a couple of projects that I can’t really dedicate enough time to at the minute but I will as soon as the house is finished. There will be more info on these shortly… They’re interesting to me and I hope they will be to a couple of other people.

Also, It would appear that either the bots or something have at least a sense of humour. I wrote this article on website comments recently – Comments, Comments, everywhere… and it is being hammered by SPAM comments. About 100 comments in 2 days. It’s interesting and gave me a chuckle. Though once you think about it, its probably been sent my way from an outbound link on the Boston Globe Website. I’d like to believe it was a funny spammer but alas it probably isn’t!

I’m also buying a house with my beautiful girlfriend so that makes for some really interesting times as neither of us really, has time to do any of the huge amount of paperwork that is required… mortgages, life assurance, home insurance, surveys, quotes for other work… It really mounts up. So as its late I’ll keep this one short and sweet…

While out and about recently, I came across two examples of sign writing genius that I just had to share with the world…

What does this sign say to you? I know what it says to me… that I would save absolutely no money in their End of Year sale… That I saw walking past the particular motor showroom on Parkgate Street in Dublin.

And now look at the bottom right of the next photo… what does that even mean??

Your! Food on the Move – I’m sorry, what? What is that even supposed to mean? How did it get past the spell checker on MS word for that matter! So there you go… A nice quick post before I resume normal service some time next week!