YOUTUBE BUILT!
go any faster.’ It didn’t help when, all around them, neighbours’ extensions rocketed up. ‘They’d say, “I hope it won’t inconvenience you” and the whole thing would be done in three months and we’d go over and admire them and I’d be like, “Oh Mandie, I’m so sorry.” ’
She, meanwhile, had her own challenges — managing with two teenage boys in a small caravan, producing Christmas dinners from the tiny oven, dashing out in the rain to get peas from the freezer in the garage.
‘I am very organised,’ she says stoically. She’d have to be. Two years into the build, Eva was born and, suddenly, there were four of them in the caravan.
‘In many ways she made things better,’ says Mandie.
Then, in 2015, when Eva was three and the stairs were about to go in, Mandie was in hospital with back surgery — having two vertebrae fused — and came home to a building site to recuperate.
So did she ever really blow — ever shout and scream and hurl pots and pans about?
‘There were days,’ she says. ‘There definitely were days . . .’
When she wished it had never started, when she ‘vented’ to friends over a glass of wine about how long it was taking, about what a perfectionist he was.
‘But I always knew that he had to finish it, otherwise he’d just feel like he’d completely failed. What was the point in getting halfway?’ So to Graham, she’d simply say: ‘You’re amazing, just keep going.’
He did his best, but there were endless delays — from rain, flu, long, cold winters and him wanting to get it right.
Then, in 2015, he was offered a job he couldn’t say no to as head of procurement for a care-home company and stopped work on the house for two years. A lesser woman would have walked out but, somehow, Mandie held it together — finding the silver lining at every setback and delay.
HER faith was finally rewarded last April when they got sign-off on their five-bedroom home, complete with three bathrooms, a gym and a TV room in the garden, as well as a utility room-cum-garage.
It might not be to everyone’s taste, but Graham’s attention to detail means the finish is exceptional — so good that officials asked him to enter it into the local authority building competition. ‘That felt pretty good,’ he beams.
It has clean, perfect lines, empty surfaces, a mint-green bedroom suite and a gorgeous, girly bedroom for Eva, now eight. There is also a floating kitchen counter, slate-grey kitchen units, a computerised sound system and a vast downstairs wet room. Amazingly, Graham has no regrets. Not even the time it took. ‘I can honestly say, there is nothing I would have done differently,’ he says.
The build cost about €160,000 and has produced a house worth nearly half a million, though they are reluctant to talk figures. They both insist it is their home for life.
But I am not so sure about that. Because while Graham always vowed he would never do another build and deliberately sold or gave away all his building machinery to remove the temptation, he is already twitching.
‘I love sitting on the sofa and looking up at my crisp lines,’ he says. ‘But I miss having something to do. It’s like being on a treadmill, you can’t just stop suddenly.’
So he has taken the engines out of both of their cars and replaced them.
He’s about to strip down an old bike and add new parts, and tells me how, every now and then, he gets on his hands and knees to buff his already immaculate grouting with a toothbrush.
Finally though, after some prodding, he admits that he’d love to do another renovation, if the opportunity arose.
And somehow, after years of camping out in a caravan with three children in the garden, Mandie does not go bananas. She smiles proudly, and quickly clarifies: ‘But not while we’re living in it, next time . . . please.’