People joke that they don’t come to Ireland for the weather. But I don’t know why they wouldn’t? There’s certainly enough of it here …

Over the last couple of weeks, the west coast has been battered by gale force winds and intermittent bursts of torrential rain, hampering work on the house.  Our insistence on having roof barges has rather set things back. Pat only needed a couple of dry days to complete them, but very little else could be done until the concrete had gone off. There is no doubt that they look the part in this area but, in Pat’s words, they are a “pure nuisance” to construct.  In the end, Pat took to calling the Irish Met Office each morning to check the latest forecast and, if the morning was forecast dry, he and John Devereaux would be down at the site at dawn to do one or two barges (the house has six: 2 on each of the 3 gables), which then had to be covered with heavy-duty polythene to protect them from the rain.

Even so, the speed of progress still amazes us.  The front door was delivered on Friday 11^th and, at some point during a break in the weather, ESB have installed three new telegraph poles for the electricity supply. Mercifully, they have opted to locate them beside the road … and not, as threatened, in the middle of our neighbour’s recently re-seeded meadow.

Despite the weather, John and I have been busy. Armed with our kitchen plan, we met the electrician, Pat’s brother, Joe, this week, to discuss power sockets and lighting. How exciting was that?!  In fact, Joe has also agreed to put in back boxes for our home cinema speaker system, thereby avoiding unsightly leads. Naturally, this required us to know what system we were putting in … and precipitated a shopping trip to Limerick.

Having shopped around a bit for a kitchen, we’ve fallen back on Ikea again. Pat was intrigued when we compared the price of a similar kitchen in Wickes and B&Q. Ikea is a fairly new phenomenon in Ireland, so we’ve offered to take him with us when we go. Of course, it’s Marie that we were thinking of. She will be in her element in the Market Hall section. We’ve already warned Pat that he’ll need to bring his cheque book!