‘The wedding isaniceidea but the house is the priority’
Wedding videographer Jason Nolan, who runs Jason Nolan Wedding Films, and fiancée Dace Talberga, a hairdresser, are searching for a home in Co Mayo: “WE’RE doing everything backwards: we had a little boy, Arthur, eight months ago, we’re getting married next April and the house hopefully will be this year. We have two older girls, Laura (12) and Anne (9), as well.
The wedding is a nice idea, but with a small family, the house really is the priority for us. Hopefully we’ll have that sorted before the wedding. We’re renting a five-bed detached house just outside Castlebar at the moment. It’s €850 per month.
When we first moved in three years ago, that was high, but now it’s nothing. We’re pretty lucky in Mayo insofar as there does seem to be some decent houses that are within budget.
Every time I look, I find houses and go, ‘Yeah, that’s a nice house’, ‘Yeah, I’d like that house’, so I don’t think supply would be an issue down here. If we wanted a three-bed semi in town, that’d be no problem. If we can get an extra little bit in the deposit, we might be able to squeeze a better house out of it.
Our dream home would be something like what we’re renting now: a four or fivebedroom house a couple of miles outside the town. The house we’re in, for example, is on sale for €275,000.
Realistically, we’ll probably be looking at €200,000 as a kind of a ballpark. I had a meeting a couple of years back with somebody in the bank. They advised me what I needed to have done and how I needed to have my accounts looking.
Being self-employed, I knew I needed a couple of years of nice, healthy-looking accounts with the business and personal accounts; so I’ve been working on that. Saving has been tricky enough sometimes, we had to dip into it at times, but we’re in a good position now.
A lot of people say, ‘It’s great renting — if something breaks, you ring the landlord’. But I’m the opposite to that; I’d love to be able to put up a shelf whenever I wanted to, paint walls, and just little things like that. Another major reason we want to get on the ladder now is the Help to Buy scheme being extended to the end of 2019. We’re both first-time buyers, so missing that would be terrible. The goal is to be in our new home by the end of the year.”