Maggie Molloy, the presenter of Cheap Irish Homes, is well-known for finding reasonably priced properties for other people. But she's spoken to RSVP Live about her own search for a cheap house and how it led her down the long road to Tipperary.
After leaving her native Wexford and moving into her bargain property, she set up an Instagram account called Cheap Irish Homes, sharing hidden gems with modest price tags in lesser-known parts of the country in a bid to encourage people to consider rural Ireland in search of their forever home.
The popularity of that Instagram account ultimately resulted in Maggie fronting the TV series of the same name on RTÉ One, where each episode sees the property expert help potential buyers find their dream home without breaking the bank.
Here, Maggie tells us in her own words how she came to purchase the property in Tipperary and shows us around her lovely home. You can read the full feature in this month's issue of RSVP Home, which is on shelves nationwide now.
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I bought my first home aged 23 – my journey began when I was renting in Wexford.
I had been working full-time for a couple of years so I just thought I would go into the bank one day and see what this mortgage deal is about. No one in my family ever had a mortgage, it was a totally new thing to me, so I didn’t have anyone to ask about it. I had a chat with the bank in my local town, they gave me mortgage approval for €110,000. I was on about €30,000 at the time, but in Wexford that price would maybe get you a site. It was mortgage approval on paper alone, but it didn’t do me any good.
I started looking at South Wicklow, Carlow, Kilkenny – all the surrounding counties.
I went out county by county, until I got out of Leinster and the properties got more affordable. I went to view houses in Roscommon because I thought once I was outside of Wexford I really have no attachment to a place. I was going to have to drive, it was going to be far away from home so at that stage I was looking for the best value I could find. The house in Roscommon was €20,000 and was a two-storey farmhouse, with an orchard, land and extra land available for €1000 an acre – it was the dream. I brought my dad up to it but he said it was too far away from home.
The next house I looked at was in Tipperary.
There had been a house in Wexford I’d fallen in love with but it was an old family farmhouse and the people who owned it never had any intention to sell it. The house in Tipperary had a lot of things that house had. It was a two story farmhouse, it had a stream, a little forest – it was literally idyllic. It ticked a lot of boxes. Tipperary wasn’t too far away – just two and a half hours away from home in Wexford.
Apart from the roof being good, the house was derelict.
It had no windows, I had the top half of the door but not the bottom. It was a very basic house and definitely not habitable. The weekend I got the keys, I put my stuff into it and moved in. I was sale agreed in November and got into the house the Good Friday of next year. I got an electrician in very quickly and then I was ready to live in it.
Decorating the house wasn’t a priority.
It’s kind of a strange house – even though it looked very derelict in that it was just cement floors and the walls were stripped, the woodwork was quite good and the floors, ceilings and stairs were still intact. When I came into it, I thought all of the stuff was fine – it didn’t need to be pulled out, just cleaned and sanded and painted. I saved a lot of money that way. I didn’t pull out anything that I didn't need to. The chimneys needed to be rebuilt because they were holding water, so I did. It wasn’t that I was doing nothing, I just didn’t do anything cosmetic just because I didn’t like the look of it. I got new windows, doors and a new heating system installed into it early on, but the decorative stuff wasn’t a priority.
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