Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Nightmare before Christmas Mica crisis forces couple & their children out of house
Bank/lender: EBS
No of properties with mortgage: 34 Mortgages: €5,090,000 Bank/lender: Bank of Ireland
No of properties with mortgage: 31 Mortgages: €5,036,000 Bank/lender: Peppermoney
No of properties with mortgage: 7 Mortgages: €2,075,000 their hefty mortgage. Tina, 38, and 44-year-old Harry, a community care worker, accompanied the Daily Mirror to the house for the first time in months to show the devastating effect of the defective blocks.
Through tears, Tina said: “This is our home and we can’t live here.
“We watched every part of this build from the foundations being dug to the final fittings.
“We saved and saved and put everything we had into the house. When other couples were out Harry and I stayed in and we were happy to.
“Our friends would laugh when we told them we’d come out when the house was finished. We’d see them when we’d saved enough for 100 bushes for the front garden.
“We loved every new step and building our home was a long slog, but it was our choice and we felt happy and very proud we had built something for our children who would one day inherit it. The house is built on family land that belonged to my dad’s farm and they can look out of their window and see us down the lane.
“My brother and sister-in-law live next door with their kids.
“We had our own little set-up here – out of the town but close to the people we needed to be close to.
“But now we are totally dispossessed. We are separated from our family, our life has changed so much and not for the better.”
SUB-CONTRACTOR
The Crumlishes sub-contracted their work to a local, trusted builder who they said did an excellent job – but no one knew at that stage they had been built with blocks that would disintegrate and crumble to dust.
They moved in to the house in 2003 with their son Adam and the three of them slept on a mattress on the floor of the living area of the kitchen.
Tina added: “It was a good feeling. We were excited to get into the house and very happy. We had hardly any furniture but we had enough and we just went on from there.
“The roof was on, the walls were up and we felt safe in our home.
“Now that same home is falling apart and it’s far from safe.
“The walls are bulging out, the block work is crumbling away and the roof is too heavy for the walls to take.
“When we noticed the cracks initially we thought they might just be settlement but they were very late appearing in the build and their pattern seemed all wrong.
“We had several people out to check the house and they all, including an expert engineer, told us we were in trouble.
“The engineer inspected everything and when he’d finished we knew by the look on his face it was bad news but we never imagined just how bad.”
The couple were told the roof was unstable due to the weakness of the block work of the inner and outer leaf